Packing Square Tiles into One Texture

Abstract

This paper deals with the packing of square tiles of the same size into one texture. Texture size is constrained by the graphics hardware. In particular, width and height resolutions must be powers of two. To cover the whole texture and avoid space loss, common schemes pack a number of tiles that is a power of two. We show that numbers of tiles like 5, 13, 17, 25, 34 and others can also be reached without wasting memory. To achieve this, our scheme takes advantage of texture rotation and the wrapping capability of texture-addressing, which gives a torus topology to the texture space.