Reproducing Reflection Properties of Natural Textures onto Real Object Surfaces

Synthetic decorative materials such as synthetic leather and printed wood grain are widely used in our everyday life, but we often notice that they are imitations because they lack richness of the appearance. One of the differences between the appearances of natural materials and synthetic ones is the complicated variance of reflection, but imitations have no means for reproducing the optical effect. In this paper, we first propose a technique for reproducing light and view dependent appearance of modeled CG objects onto real objects by forming anisotropic reflection on real object surfaces using microscopic grooves related with the normal vector field of modeled objects. We also propose an efficient technique to capture the normal vector field of natural materials and it makes it possible to reproduce the appearance of natural textures onto materials like plastics. Our method can be applied on mass production at a low cost, so the method is practically useful to give richness of the appearance on industrial products such as synthetic leather and wallpapers.