For visualization in virtual reality, two topics are of major importance: real-time rendering and realism. To meet these requirements, modern graphics hardware has to be applied wherever possible. A commonly used method to improve realism without decreasing the rendering speed is texturing. Today, fast texture mapping algorithms are even integrated in low-cost hardware. However, highly-resolving and non-distorting texturing is very difficult and sometimes even impossible for nonconvex complex

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... lyhedra. Nevertheless, the realism of many virtual reality applications could be improved by using non-distorted textures. Especially in surgical simulation, each anatomical detail has to be placed correctly on very complex models of human organs. For this purpose, a new method has been developed, allowing interactive placement of high-resolution bitmaps to any desired position on the model's surface. In addition, the visualization quality can be improved by using an antialiasing filter. This method, called arbitrary texture placement, utilizes polyhedron decomposition to place all polygons of the model in the two-dimensional texture space, which is used as a memory for color-information. If a bitmap is applied to the polyhedron's surface, the involved triangles are determined and the pieces of the bitmap inside the triangle are stored at the corresponding areas in the texture space. An example shows the appliance of the method to an anatomical model of the ventricular system in the human brain, used for the simulation of ng minimally invasive neurosurgery.