April 23, 2009 - Jason Lawrence

Title: Representations of Material Appearance for Computer Graphics

Abstract:
I will present recent work in modeling the visual appearance of materials. These models are a critical component of computer graphics systems which aim to synthesize realistic images of virtual scenes and computer vision systems which aim to infer properties of a 3D scene from natural images. In particular, I will focus on "data-driven" strategies for modeling complex spatially-varying opaque and translucent materials such as brushed metal, plastic, cloth, wood, candle wax and human skin. This includes our Inverse Shade Trees framework that describes how to decompose these measured high-dimensional functions into compact and understandable pieces that are useful within a production setting. I will also discuss a new design interface that allows a user to specify sparse edits that are intelligently propagated across a large collection of measurements and a new empirical model of translucent materials based on a large simulation. I will conclude with a discussion of interesting open problems in this area.