Reverse Engineering Nature

Abstract

Why is the sky blue? Why is grass green? What determines the color of human skin? Questions such as these are increasingly important in the development of the next generation algorithms for appearancemodeling in computer graphics. By closely simulating the natural world around us we can develop algorithms that are useful in areas not traditionally connected with computer graphics. An example could be the ability to predict the color of human skin in the presence of certain diseases.In this talk, I will describe some of our recentwork in simulating the appearance of materials such as human skin, milk, and ice. This includes new research for predicting the appearance of materials based on their molecular structure in order to answer the question: what will it look like if I mix these molecules together ?