1. A system for automatically synthesizing a texton map on a three-dimentional mesh surface, comprising: providing a sample bidirectional texture function (BTF); generating a two-dimensional texton map from the sample BTF; computing a dot-product matrix representing a surface texton space from the sample BTF; providing a three-dimensional mesh representing a three-dimensional surface; and iteratively synthesizing a surface texton map for the three-dimensional mesh from the two-dimensional texton map and the dot-product matrix.