A Realistic Surface-based Cloth Rendering Model

Abstract

We propose a surface-based cloth shading model that generates realistic cloth appearance with ply-level details. It generalizes previous surface-based models to a broader set of cloth including knitted and thin woven cloth. Our model takes into account the most dominant visual features of cloth, including anisotropic S-shaped reflection highlight, cross-shaped transmission highlights, delta transmission, and shadowing masking. We model these elements via a comprehensive micro-scale BSDF and a meso-scale effective BSDF formulation. Then, we propose an implementation that leverages the Monte Carlo sampler of path tracing for reducing precomputation to the bare minimum, by evaluating the effective BSDF as a Monte Carlo estimate, and encoding visibility using anisotropic spherical Gaussians. We demonstrate our model by replicating a set of woven and knitted fabrics, showing good match with respect to captured photographs.