Abstract: Real-time video information is digitized and stored as a plurality of digital pixels in a memory. A 3D surface is then constructed from a flat source surface by breaking the surface into a plurality of flat polygonal patches and folding, rotating and manipulating the patches in three dimensions. The constructed object can then be manipulated as an object in three dimensions. During patch and object manipulation, the special effects system keeps track of the patch vertex locations. After the object has been created and located, real-time video is painted on the object surface by using the patch vertex locations to retrieve selected source pixels from the memory and to construct a value for each pixel on the object surface from the selected source pixels.