Towards a Consistent, Tool Independent Virtual Material Appearance

Abstract

Current materials appearance is mainly tool dependent and requires time, labour and computational cost to deliver consistent visual result. Within the industry, the development of a project is often based on a virtual model, which is usually developed by means of a collaboration among several departments, which exchange data. Unfortunately, a virtual material in most cases does not appear the same as the original once imported in a different renderer due to different algorithms and settings. The aim of this research is to provide artists with a general solution, applicable regardless the file format and the software used, thus allowing them to uniform the output of the renderer they use with a reference application, arbitrarily selected within an industry, to which all the renderings obtained with other software will be made visually uniform. We propose to characterize the appearance of several classes of materials rendered using the arbitrary reference software by extracting relevant visual characteristics. By repeating the same process for any other renderer we are able to derive ad-hoc mapping functions between the two renderers. Our approach allows us to hallucinate the appearance of a scene, depicting mainly the selected classes of materials, under the reference software.