Patch Textures: Hardware Implementation of Mesh Colors

Mesh colors provide an effective alternative to standard texture mapping. They significantly simplify the asset production pipeline by removing the need for defining a mapping and eliminate rendering artifacts due to seams. This paper addresses the problem that using mesh colors for real-time rendering has not been practical, due to the absence of hardware support. We show that it is possible to provide full hardware texture filtering support for mesh colors with minimal changes to existing GPUs by introducing a hardware-friendly representation for mesh colors that we call patch textures. We discuss the hardware modifications needed for storing and filtering patch textures.