Micro-appearance Modeling of Fabrics

Abstract

Fabrics are essential to our everyday lives. Modeling and reproducing the appearance of fabrics have been an active research topic in computer graphics for decades. Traditionally, fabrics are treated as infinitely thin 2D sheets. These surface-based reflectance models, although being conceptually simple, have insufficient power to describe a fabric’s small-scale 3D geometries, such as disorganized layers of fibers in felts. Thus, these models cannot accurately reproduce the fabric’s thickness and fuzziness, limiting the level of realism they can offer. In contrast, micro-appearance models explicitly express those fiber-level structures, upon which greatly varying visual effects, from anisotropic highlights to deep textures, emerge automatically. Unfortunately, these models are generally difficult to build due to their high complexities. This article presents a family of algorithms that introduce a new way to automatically build volumetric and fiber-based micro-appearance models for fabrics. The results capture rich details at the fiber level, yielding highly realistic renderings even under extreme close-ups.