No abstract

Complex specular microstructures found in glittery, scratched or brushed metal materials exhibit high frequency variations in reflected light intensity. These variations are important for the human eye and give materials their uniqueness and personality. To model such microsurfaces, high definition normal maps are very effective. The works of Yan et al. [21,22] enable the rendering of such material representations by evaluating a microfacet based BRDF related to a whole ray footprint. Still, in specific configurations and especially at grazing angles, their method does not fully capture the expected material appearance. We propose to build upon their work and tackle the problem of accuracy using a more physically based reflection model. To do so, the normal map is approximated with a mixture of anisotropic, noncentered Beckmann normal distribution functions from which a closed form for the maskingshadowing term can be derived. Based on our formal definition, we provide a fast approximation leading to a performance overhead varying from 5% to 20% compared to the method of Yan et al. [22]. Our results show that we more closely match ground truth renderings than their methods.

International audienceWe present a novel approach to offset solids in the context of fabrication. Our input solids can be given under any representation: boundary meshes, voxels, indicator functions or CSG expressions. The result is a ray-based representation of the offset solid directly used for visualization and fabrication: We never need to recover a boundary mesh in our context. We define the offset solid as a sequence of morphological operations along line segments. This is equivalent to offsetting the surface by a solid defined as a Minkowski sum of segments, also known as a zonotope. A zonotope may be used to approximate the Euclidean ball with precise error bounds. We propose two complementary implementations. The first is dedicated to solids represented by boundary meshes. It performs offsetting by modifying the mesh in sequence. The result is a mesh improper for direct display, but that can be resolved into the correct offset solid through a ray representation. The major advantage of this first approach is that no loss of information – re-sampling – occurs during the offsetting sequence. However, it applies only to boundary meshes and cannot mix sequences of dilations and erosions. Our second implementation is more general as it applies directly to a ray-based representation of any solid and supports any sequence of erosion and dilation along segments. We discuss its fast implementation on modern graphics hardware. Together, the two approaches result in a versatile tool box for the efficient offsetting of solids in the context of fabrication

Rendering materials such as metallic paints, scratched metals and rough plastics requires glint integrators that can capture all micro‐specular highlights falling into a pixel footprint, faithfully replicating surface appearance. Specular normal maps can be used to represent a wide range of arbitrary micro‐structures. The use of normal maps comes with important drawbacks though: the appearance is dark overall due to back‐facing normals and importance sampling is suboptimal, especially when the micro‐surface is very rough. We propose a new glint integrator relying on a multiple‐scattering patch‐based BRDF addressing these issues. To do so, our method uses a modified version of microfacet‐based normal mapping [SHHD17] designed for glint rendering, leveraging symmetric microfacets. To model multiple‐scattering, we re‐introduce the lost energy caused by a perfectly specular, single‐scattering formulation instead of using expensive random walks. This reflectance model is the basis of our patch‐based BRDF, enabling robust sampling and artifact‐free rendering with a natural appearance. Additional calculation costs amount to about 40% in the worst cases compared to previous methods [YHMR16, CCM18].