Joint UV Optimization and Texture Baking

Level of detail has been widely used in interactive computer graphics. In current industrial 3D modeling pipelines, artists rely on commercial software to generate highly detailed models with UV maps and then bake textures for low-poly counterparts. In these pipelines, each step is performed separately, leading to unsatisfactory visual appearances for low polygon count models. Moreover, existing texture baking techniques assume the low-poly mesh has a small geometric difference from the high-poly, which is often not true in practice, especially with extremely low poly count models.

To alleviate the visual discrepancy of the low-poly mesh, we propose to jointly optimize UV mappings during texture baking, allowing for low-poly models to faithfully replicate the appearance of the high-poly even with large geometric differences. We formulate the optimization within a differentiable rendering framework, allowing the automatic adjustment of texture regions to encode appearance information. To compensate for view parallax when two meshes have large geometric differences, we introduce a spherical harmonic parallax mapping, which uses spherical harmonic functions to modulate per-texel UV coordinates based on the view direction. We evaluate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach on a dataset composed of online downloaded models, with varying complexities and geometric discrepancies. Our method achieves superior quality over state-of-the-art techniques and commercial solutions.