SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR EDITING, OPTIMIZING, AND RENDERING PROCEDURAL TEXTURES

1 . A system for editing and generating procedural textures comprising at least one microprocessor, a memory and a list of instructions, and allowing procedural textures in a procedural format to be edited, and, based on the edited procedural data, generating textures in a raster format, and further comprising:

an editing tool, adapted to provide a user interface for creating or modifying textures in a procedural format;

an optimization device, provided with a linearization module, a parameter-effect tracking module and a graph data module, for storing graph data in an optimized procedural format; and

a rendering engine, adapted to generate raster textures based on the graph data in an optimized procedural format and comprising a parameter list traversal module M 0 , a filter execution module M 1 , a parameter evaluation module M 2 and a filter module, comprising the data to be executed for each of the filters.

2 . The editing system according to claim 1 , wherein the filters include data and mathematical operators.

3 . A device for optimizing textures in a procedural format, comprising at least one microprocessor, a memory and a list of instructions, and further comprising:

a linearization module;

a parameter tracking module; and

a graph data module “D”.

4 . The optimization device according to claim 3 , integrated within a procedural texture editing device.

5 . The optimization device according to claim 3 , integrated within a rendering engine.

6 . The optimization device according to claim 3 , integrated within a third party application.

7 . The optimization device according claim 3 , wherein a specific and separate module stores the optimized data.

8 . A rendering engine for rendering textures or images in a procedural format, comprising at least one microprocessor, a memory and a list of instructions, and further comprising:

a list traversal module M 0 for traversing list of the processes to be performed;

a filter execution module M 1 ;

a parameter evaluation module M 2 ; and

a filter module, which includes the data to be executed for each of the filters.

9 . The rendering engine for rendering textures or images in a procedural format according to claim 8 , integrated within an application which includes at least one image generation phase, wherein said generation is performed based on graph data in an optimized procedural format.

10 . A texture editing and generating method for a texture editing and generating system according to claim 1 , comprising the steps of:

generating the graph data in a procedural format, using an editing tool; and

optimizing the generated data into graph data in an optimized procedural format, using an optimization device.

11 . A procedural texture generating method for a rendering engine according to claim 8 , comprising, for each filter involved, the steps of:

traversing the list of graph data in an optimized procedural format;

reading, from the graph data in a procedural optimized format, the parameters used for the computation performed for the fixed parameter values;

evaluating the user functions for computing the value of the non-fixed parameters;

recovering the memory locations of the intermediate results to be consumed in the computation of the current node;

performing the computation of the current data for graphs in an optimized procedural format for determining corresponding raster data;

storing the result image into memory; and,

when all of the filters involved have been processed, making the generated raster texture available to the host application.