Rendering of Japanese Artcraft

Abstract

We present several methods for simulation of Japanese lacquer ware, a prominent Far East Asian handicraft art. We consider two most popular kinds of Japanese lacquer ware made by the makie and nashiji techniques. For rendering makie, we propose a method for preparing RGBA textures from digital photos of art items. The alpha channels of these textures control the weight with which color channels are blended with the measured biderectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) of a metallic finish. Both ray tracing and hardware based rendering are demonstrated. In the latter case, we show how the calculation of a sphere map texture used for BRDF visualization can be accelerated using a special coordinate system for tabulated BRDF. The depth effect manifested by nashiji lacquer is simulated by the explicit modeling of metal platelets immersed in absorptive material.