A computational appearance fabrication framework and derived applications

Abstract

Traditionally, control over the appearance of objects in the real world was performed manually. Understanding how some physical property of an object would affect its appearance was achieved primarily through trial and error. This procedure could be lengthy and cumbersome, depending on the complexity of the effect of physical properties on appearance and the duration of each fabrication cycle. Precise control of how light interacts with materials has many applications in arts, architecture, industrial design, and engineering. With the recent achievements in geometry retrieval and computational fabrication we are now able to precisely control and replicate the geometry of real-world objects. On the other hand, computational appearance fabrication is still in its infancy. In this thesis we lay he foundation for a general computational appearance fabrication framework, and we demonstrate a range of applications that benefit from it. We present various instances of our framework and detail the design of the corresponding components, such as: forward and backward appearance models, measurement, and fabrication. These framework instances help in understanding and controlling the appearance of three general classes of materials: homogeneous participating media (such as wax and milk), specular surfaces (such as lenses), and granular media (such as sugar and snow). More specifically we show how we can precisely measure, control, and fabricate the real-world appearance of homogeneous translucent materials, how to computationally design and fabricate steganographic lenses, and finally we present a fast appearance model for accurately simulating the appearance of granular media.