Electrovibration technique can modify user's perception of a surface through the modulation of the sliding friction accordingly to the voltage applied. This paper is introducing a novel approach to virtual haptic rendering in electrovibration based haptic displays in order to provide realistic feeling of a simulated surface, where the required voltage signal is obtained using a simplified equation. The approach was validated by the use of a finite element computational framework able to simulate tactile scenarios on real and virtual surfaces. A database of pre-compiled tactile scenarios was generated to predict outputs for custom parametric surfaces through a conditional average estimator method. In addition, an experimental database obtained by active exploration of different surfaces, is utilised for texture rendering. A web application, comprising the algorithms described in the paper, has also been developed , and is freely available to use at http://www.haptictexture.com. Keywords: electrovibration · haptic rendering · finite element model · finger pad · virtual prototyping · haptic display · friction