Predictive rendering of composite materials, a multi-scale approach

Abstract : Predictive rendering of material appearance means going deep into the understanding of the physical interaction between light and matter and how these interactions are perceived by the human brain. In this paper we describe our approach to predict the appearance of composite materials by relying on the multi-scale nature of the involved phenomena. Using recent works on physical modeling of complex materials, we show how to predict the aspect of a composite material based on its composition and its morphology. Specifically, we focus on the materials whose morphological structures are defined at several embedded scales. We rely on the assumption that when the inclusions in a composite material are smaller than the considered wavelength, the optical constants of the corresponding effective media can be computed by a homogenization process (or analytically for special cases) to be used into the Fresnel formulas.