Digital modeling of the appearance of materials

Course Description We present an introduction to the digital modeling of materials for realistic image synthesis. We present a visual tour of images of real materials, and consider how they are classified by the effects that need to be modeled to realistically render them. Essential appearance concepts such as diffuse, specular, subsurface scattering and wave effects will be defined and illustrated. We will then discuss popularly used numerical models such as Ward, Lafortune and Cook-Torrance. We will discuss these in terms of the effects they capture and the visual impact of the parameters of each model, and will not cover their mathematical derivations. We will conclude with the consideration of models that simulate the processing or aging of materials to predict their variation with time. The goal of the course is to provide an introduction to translating observation of materials in the real world into model parameters and/or code for synthesizing realistic images. Course Prerequisites The course requires only an introductory level of familiarity with computer graphics from either a previous course or practical experience. We will assume that the students understand basic terms and ideas such as setting a pixel color by specifying values of red, green and blue, and projecting a triangle onto a set of pixels given the specification of a virtual pinhole camera. Instructors Holly Rushmeier is a Professor of Computer Science at Yale University. Since receiving the Ph.D. from Cornell in 1988, and she has conducted research in global illumination, data visualization, applications of perception, 3D scanning, and applications of computer graphics in cultural heritage. She has published in SIGGRAPH, ACM TOG, IEEE CG&A and IEEE TVCG. Over the past 15 years, she has organized SIGGRAPH courses on radiosity, global illumination and a scanning case study, and has lectured in SIGGRAPH courses on capturing surface properties and applying perceptual principles to rendering. Julie Dorsey is a Professor of Computer Science at Yale University, where she teaches computer graphics. Before joining the Yale faculty, she was a tenured faculty member at MIT. She received undergraduate (BS, BArch 1987) and graduate (MS 1990, PhD 1993) degrees from Cornell University. Her research interests include photorealistic image synthesis, material and texture models, illustration techniques, and interactive visualization of complex scenes. In addition to serving on numerous conference program committees, she is a member of the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics and is an area …