Our latest work on texture synthesis from example has been accpeted to EGSR 2008!! Check it out here: http://www-sop.inria.fr/reves/Basilic/2008/DLTD08/.
The key idea is to synthesize solid textures for surfaces, but only for the voxels around the object. Hence we never have to store or compute the entire volume. Our GPU implementation is very fast, so we can in fact synthesize a texture for the interior surfaces whenever an object is cut or broken. We obtain much more variety than a direct tiling of a 3D tile, which would create visible repetitions along some directions (and require storing a full volume tile). There is no pre-process of the object interior (ie. no thetrahedrons, no prior-knowledge of where the object will fracture) so our approach could be used for interactive breaking of large structures.
This is a collaboration with Yue Dong and Xin Tong (from MSRA). The project was very fun to work on, and I hope you'll find it interesting and - most importantly - useful.
I will add some more material on the paper webpage soon.
