Material Design

MOTIVATION: Introduce tools that guide the design of complex optical material appearance, most often yielding many-to-one physical-to-visual mappings. INSPIRATION: The Similarity relations in the radiance transfer equation, Gulbrandsen’s mapping for complex refractive indices. An Inverse Method for the Exploration of Layered Material AppearanceMégane Bati, Pascal Barla, Romain PacanowskiACM Transactions on Graphics, 2021Archive – Paper – Project

Lighting Design

MOTIVATION: Introduce tools that guide the design of lighting environments, with the goal of conveying shape, material or space. INSPIRATION: The book “Lighting: Science and Magic”, by Hunter and Fuqua; Bousseau’s paper on lighting optimization. Effects of light map orientation and shape on the visual perception of canonical materialsFan Zhang; Huib de Ridder; Pascal Barla; Sylvia PontJournal of Vision 2020, … Read more

Substance dynamics

MOTIVATION: Understand how structural properties of substances (elasticity, plasticity, viscosity) are perceived in order to enable more direct artistic editing, avoiding trial and error common with simulations. INSPIRATION: Shin’ya Nishida work on seeing liquids. The wooden sculptures of Dabiel Webb that give the illusion of non-rigidity. A Time-independent Deformer for Elastic-Rigid ContactsCamille Brunel, Pierre Bénard, … Read more

Material properties

MOTIVATION: Provide models of material appearance, as well as methods to edit and process measured materials, relying either on physical or perceptual considerations. INSPIRATION: Koenderink and Pont analytic papers on various types of materials, Marchner et al. BRDF models, Burley’s artistic approach to material appearance.   A Composite BRDF Model for Hazy GlossPascal Barla, Romain … Read more

Motion flows

MOTIVATION: Understand how motion in 3D induces motion in images (acretions, deletions, compressions, dilations, etc). Useful for stylization purposes, layout enhancement, and probably much more. INSPIRATION: Bousseau et al. work on watercolorisation of videos. Gibson’s book “The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception”. Specular Motion and 3D Shape EstimationDicle N. Dövencioğlu, Ohad Ben-Shahar, Pascal Barla, Katja DoerschnerJournal … Read more

Procedural drawing

MOTIVATION: Automate the production of drawing patterns composed of many simple elements. Derive the procedure from scratch or from an example, correlate to underlying image features when available. INSPIRATION: Ostromoukhov et al. & Hurtut et al. example-based techniques. Grabli et al. & Loi et al. procedural drawing systems. Zaidi et al. perceptual experiments on shape-from-textures. … Read more

Surface features

MOTIVATION: Extract features (bumps, ridges, valleys, inflections) from arbitrary surfaces at multiple scales. Applied to line-based rendering, illustrative shading, 3D shape editing, etc. INSPIRATION: Guennebaud et al work on Algebraic Point Set Surfaces. Koenderink et al work on solid shape invariants.   Screen-Space Curvature for Production-Quality Rendering and Compositing.Nicolas Mellado, Pascal Barla, Gaël Guennebaud, Patrick … Read more

Image features

MOTIVATION: Extract features (contours, lines, junctions) from arbitrary images at multiple scales. Applied to image manipulation, sketch reconstruction, color filtering, etc. INSPIRATION: The Scale-Space litterature and use of Gaussian Derivatives. Adelson et al work on steerable filters and image pyramids. Zucker et al. work on folds and flows. Flow-guided Warping for Image-based Shape ManipulationRomain Vergne, … Read more

2D animation

MOTIVATION: Assist in the creation of in-betweens from a set of keyframe poses (image, drawing, etc). Suggest correspondences, derive mappings and let users control the interpolation process. INSPIRATION: Alexa et al. as-rigid-as-possible interpolation. Sykora et al. various techniques for 2D animation. Richard William’s book “The Animator Survival Kit”. Example-based Expressive Animation of 2D Rigid BodiesMarek … Read more

Digital painting

MOTIVATION: Provide painting tools that quickly produce color gradients, highlights, texture and reflection patterns. Ease and speed up the creation process in vector and/or raster graphics, leverage artistic skills. INSPIRATION: Elder et al. image reconstruction from its luminance edges. Jeschke et al. various extensions to Diffusion Curves. Gombrich’s book “Art and Illusion” Surface Flows for … Read more