Inverse Bi-scale Material Design
Hongzhi Wu Julie Dorsey Holly Rushmeier
ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH Asia 2013)
Selected for the SIGGRAPH Asia movie trailer
Hongzhi Wu Julie Dorsey Holly Rushmeier
ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH Asia 2013)
Selected for the SIGGRAPH Asia movie trailer
Abstract
One major shortcoming of existing bi-scale material design systems is the lack of support for inverse design: there is no way to directly edit the large-scale appearance and then rapidly solve for the small-scale details that approximate that look. Prior work is either too slow to provide quick feedback, or limited in the types of small-scale details that can be handled. We present a novel computational framework for inverse bi-scale material design. The key idea is to convert the challenging inverse appearance computation into efficient search in two precomputed large libraries: one including a wide range of measured and analytical materials, and the other procedurally generated and height-map-based geometries. We demonstrate a variety of editing operations, including finding visually equivalent details that produce similar large-scale appearance, which can be useful in applications such as physical fabrication of materials.
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Paper(.PDF) [Hi-res, 15.3MB] [Low-res, 0.8MB]
Bibtex [.TXT]
Video [Vimeo HD] [.MP4, 46.2MB]
SIGGRAPH Asia Presentation Slides [.PPSX]
Public Height-map Database (for Constructing Small-scale Geometries)
We now make public a database of height-maps, which are used to populate our small-scale geometry library. The database consists of a wide variety (total number 33K) of gray-scale image patches of 128x128, whose low-frequency signals are removed to make it more suitable as a tilable structure. These images can be directly converted to 3D geometries, by applying different amplitudes.
We hope that our height-map database could be useful to both computer graphics and computer vision research, where a large number of small-scale geometries are needed.
The database is free for academic use. The only requirement we ask is to cite the Inverse Bi-scale Material Design paper in your publication that uses our data. Please email me using a title that starts with "[Height-map Database]" to apply for downloading the database. In the email, it would be good to include your name, affiliation and a rough plan about how to use the database.