The Institute Colloquium
Date
Monday, September 28, 2015 12:45 - 14:00
Speaker
Steve Marschner (Cornell University)
Location
Raiffeisen Lecture Hall, Central Building
Series
Colloquium
Tags
Institute Colloquium
Contact
Url
Many beautiful materials derive their appearance and mechanical properties from a microstructure composed of fibers. This is true of hair, fur, cloth, and even wood. This talk will discuss recent research on modeling, simulation, and rendering that applies to these materials, which shares the theme of modeling and measuring structure to get the right appearance. In hair, the key problem is to model the complex patterns formed by light interacting with individual transparent fibers, which are caused by the small-scale structure of the fibers and their surfaces. Smaller fibers packed together into a solid give rise to the varied appearance of wood, which reflects the three-dimensional anatomy trees, leading to distinctive grain and figure on cut and polished surfaces. The final topic is a new technique for realistically rendering textiles using volume data originating from micro CT scans of small samples of cloth.