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 from the 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.