Simulation of 3 D Model , Shape , and Appearance Aging

SIMULATION OF 3D MODEL, SHAPE, AND APPEARANCE AGING BY PHYSICAL, CHEMICAL, BIOLOGICAL, ENVIRONMENTAL, AND WEATHERING EFFECTS Joseph T. Kider Jr. Supervisor : Norman I. Badler Physical, chemical, biological, environmental, and weathering effects produce a range of 3D model, shape, and appearance changes. Time introduces an assortment of aging, weathering, and decay processes such as dust, mold, patina, and fractures. These timevarying imperfections provide the viewer with important visual cues for realism and age. Existing approaches that create realistic aging effects still require an excessive amount of time and effort by extremely skilled artists to tediously hand fashion blemishes or simulate simple procedural rules. Most techniques do not scale well to large virtual environments. These limitations have prevented widespread utilization of many aging and weathering algorithms. We introduce a novel method for geometrically and visually simulating these processes in order to create visually realistic scenes. This work proposes the “μ-ton” system, a framework for scattering numerous μ-ton particles throughout an environment to mutate and age the world. We take a point based representation to discretize both the decay effects and the underlying geometry. The μ-ton particles simulate interactions between multiple phenomena. This mutation process changes both the physical properties of the external surface layer and the internal volume substrate. The mutation may add or subtract imperfections into the environment as objects age. First we review related work in aging and weathering, and illustrate the limitations of the current data-driven and physically based approaches. We provide a taxonomy of aging processes. We then describe the structure for our “μ-ton” framework, and we provide the user a short tutorial how to setup different effects. The first application of the “μ-ton”