Virtual Material Acquisition and Representation for Computer Graphics (Synthesis Lectures on Visual Computing: Computer Graphics, Animation, Computational Photography and Imaging)

This book provides beginners in computer graphics and related fields a guide to the concepts, models, and technologies for realistic rendering of material appearance. It provides a complete and thorough overview of reflectance models and acquisition setups, along with providing a selection of the available tools to explore, visualize, and render the reflectance data. Reflectance models are under continuous development, since there is still no straightforward solution for general material representations. Every reflectance model is specific to a class of materials. Hence, each has strengths and weaknesses, which the book highlights in order to help the reader choose the most suitable model for any purpose. The overview of the acquisition setups will provide guidance to a reader who needs to acquire virtual materials and will help them to understand which measurement setup can be useful for a particular purpose, while taking into account the performance and the expected cost derived fromthe required components. The book also describes several recent open source software solutions, useful for visualizing and manipulating a wide variety of reflectance models and data.

Darya Guarnera is a Research Associate at Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She obtained her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Loughborough University, UK. She obtained her Postgraduate Certificate in Education and first-class degree in Computer Science from Liverpool Hope University. In 2006, she received the Student of the Year award upon graduation from Liverpool Community College in 3D modeling. She also obtained a B.Sc. in Architecture from the Odessa State Academy of Civil Engineering and Architecture. Her interests include 3D Architectural Visualization, virtual materials, digital art, and sculpture. She is a guest lecturer at Liverpool Hope University and part-time lecturer at Liverpool Community College.Giuseppe Claudio Guarnera, Ph.D., is a Research Associate at Norwegian University of Science and Technology. His current research interests include appearance modeling and human perception of materials. Previously he was a postdoctoral Research Associate at Loughborough University, focusing on fabric appearance modeling and acquisition. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Catania, Italy, with a doctoral dissertation in the area of Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, partially achieved while he was a Visiting Researcher at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies under the supervision of Dr. Abhijeet Ghosh and Prof. Paul Debevec.