Extra detail addition based on existing texture for animated news production

Animated news proposed by Next Media Animation becomes more and more popular because an animation is adapted to tell the story in a piece of news which may miss visual and audial circumstances. In order to fulfill the requirement of creating a 90-second animation within 2 h, artists must quickly set up required news elements by selecting existing 3D objects from their graphics asset database and adding distinguished details such as tattoos, scars, and textural patterns onto selected objects. Therefore, the detail addition process is necessary and must be easy to use, efficient, and robust without any modification to the production pipeline and without addition of extra rendering pass to the rendering pipeline. This work aims at stitching extra details onto existing textures with a cube-based interface using the well-designed texture coordinates. A texture cube of the detail texture is first created for artists to manipulate and adjust stitching properties. Then, the corresponding transformation between the original and detail textures is automatically computed to decompose the. detail texture into triangular patches for composition with the original texture. Finally, a complete detail-added object texture is created for shading. The designed algorithm has been integrated into the Next Media Animation pipeline to accelerate animation production and the results are satisfactory.