Procedural Editing of Bidirectional Texture Functions

Measured material representations like Bidirectional Texture Functions or Reflectance Fields offer very realistic appearance but the user is currently not capable of changing this appearance in an effective and intuitive way. Such editing operations would require a low-dimensional but expressive model for appearance that exposes only a small set of intuitively editable parameters (1D-sliders, 2D-maps) to the user but preserves all visually relevant details. In this paper we present a novel editing technique for complex spatially varying materials. It is based on the observation that we are already good in modeling the basic geometric structure of many natural and manmade materials but still have not found effective models for the detailed small-scale geometry and the interaction of light with these materials. Our main idea is to use procedural geometry to define the basic structure of a material and then to enrich this structure with the BTF information captured from real materials. By employing recent algorithms for real-time texture synthesis and BTF compression our technique allows interactive editing.