No Arabic abstract
Many different techniques for measuring material appearance have been proposed in the last few years. These have produced large public datasets, which have been used for accurate, data-driven appearance modeling. However, although these datasets have allowed us to reach an unprecedented level of realism in visual appearance, editing the captured data remains a challenge. In this paper, we present an intuitive control space for predictable editing of captured BRDF data, which allows for artistic creation of plausible novel material appearances, bypassing the difficulty of acquiring novel samples. We first synthesize novel materials, extending the existing MERL dataset up to 400 mathematically valid BRDFs. We then design a large-scale experiment, gathering 56,000 subjective ratings on the high-level perceptual attributes that best describe our extended dataset of materials. Using these ratings, we build and train networks of radial basis functions to act as functionals mapping the perceptual attributes to an underlying PCA-based representation of BRDFs. We show that our functionals are excellent predictors of the perceived attributes of appearance. Our control space enables many applications, including intuitive material editing of a wide range of visual properties, guidance for gamut mapping, analysis of the correlation between perceptual attributes, or novel appearance similarity metrics. Moreover, our methodology can be used to derive functionals applicable to classic analytic BRDF representations. We release our code and dataset publicly, in order to support and encourage further research in this direction.
We present a model to measure the similarity in appearance between different materials, which correlates with human similarity judgments. We first create a database of 9,000 rendered images depicting objects with varying materials, shape and illumination. We then gather data on perceived similarity from crowdsourced experiments; our analysis of over 114,840 answers suggests that indeed a shared perception of appearance similarity exists. We feed this data to a deep learning architecture with a novel loss function, which learns a feature space for materials that correlates with such perceived appearance similarity. Our evaluation shows that our model outperforms existing metrics. Last, we demonstrate several applications enabled by our metric, including appearance-based search for material suggestions, database visualization, clustering and summarization, and gamut mapping.
BRDF models are ubiquitous tools for the representation of material appearance. However, there is now an astonishingly large number of different models in practical use. Both a lack of BRDF model standardisation across implementations found in different renderers, as well as the often semantically different capabilities of various models, have grown to be a major hindrance to the interchange of production assets between different rendering systems. Current attempts to solve this problem rely on manually finding visual similarities between models, or mathematical ones between their functional shapes, which requires access to the shader implementation, usually unavailable in commercial renderers. We present a method for automatic translation of material appearance between different BRDF models, which uses an image-based metric for appearance comparison, and that delegates the interaction with the model to the renderer. We analyse the performance of the method, both with respect to robustness and visual differences of the fits for multiple combinations of BRDF models. While it is effective for individual BRDFs, the computational cost does not scale well for spatially-varying BRDFs. Therefore, we further present a parametric regression scheme that approximates the shape of the transformation function and generates a reduced representation which evaluates instantly and without further interaction with the renderer. We present respective visual comparisons of the remapped SVBRDF models for commonly used renderers and shading models, and show that our approach is able to extrapolate transformed BRDF parameters better than other complex regression schemes.
We propose a novel and flexible roof modeling approach that can be used for constructing planar 3D polygon roof meshes. Our method uses a graph structure to encode roof topology and enforces the roof validity by optimizing a simple but effective planarity metric we propose. This approach is significantly more efficient than using general purpose 3D modeling tools such as 3ds Max or SketchUp, and more powerful and expressive than specialized tools such as the straight skeleton. Our optimization-based formulation is also flexible and can accommodate different styles and user preferences for roof modeling. We showcase two applications. The first application is an interactive roof editing framework that can be used for roof design or roof reconstruction from aerial images. We highlight the efficiency and generality of our approach by constructing a mesh-image paired dataset consisting of 2539 roofs. Our second application is a generative model to synthesize new roof meshes from scratch. We use our novel dataset to combine machine learning and our roof optimization techniques, by using transformers and graph convolutional networks to model roof topology, and our roof optimization methods to enforce the planarity constraint.
Micro-appearance models have brought unprecedented fidelity and details to cloth rendering. Yet, these models neglect fabric mechanics: when a piece of cloth interacts with the environment, its yarn and fiber arrangement usually changes in response to external contact and tension forces. Since subtle changes of a fabrics microstructures can greatly affect its macroscopic appearance, mechanics-driven appearance variation of fabrics has been a phenomenon that remains to be captured. We introduce a mechanics-aware model that adapts the microstructures of cloth yarns in a physics-based manner. Our technique works on two distinct physical scales: using physics-based simulations of individual yarns, we capture the rearrangement of yarn-level structures in response to external forces. These yarn structures are further enriched to obtain appearance-driving fiber-level details. The cross-scale enrichment is made practical through a new parameter fitting algorithm for simulation, an augmented procedural yarn model coupled with a custom-design regression neural network. We train the network using a dataset generated by joint simulations at both the yarn and the fiber levels. Through several examples, we demonstrate that our model is capable of synthesizing photorealistic cloth appearance in a %dynamic and mechanically plausible way.
We present a suite of techniques for jointly optimizing triangle meshes and shading models to match the appearance of reference scenes. This capability has a number of uses, including appearance-preserving simplification of extremely complex assets, conversion between rendering systems, and even conversion between geometric scene representations. We follow and extend the classic analysis-by-synthesis family of techniques: enabled by a highly efficient differentiable renderer and modern nonlinear optimization algorithms, our results are driven to minimize the image-space difference to the target scene when rendered in similar viewing and lighting conditions. As the only signals driving the optimization are differences in rendered images, the approach is highly general and versatile: it easily supports many different forward rendering models such as normal mapping, spatially-varying BRDFs, displacement mapping, etc. Supervision through images only is also key to the ability to easily convert between rendering systems and scene representations. We output triangle meshes with textured materials to ensure that the models render efficiently on modern graphics hardware and benefit from, e.g., hardware-accelerated rasterization, ray tracing, and filtered texture lookups. Our system is integrated in a small Python code base, and can be applied at high resolutions and on large models. We describe several use cases, including mesh decimation, level of detail generation, seamless mesh filtering and approximations of aggregate geometry.