Simulating painted appearance of BTF materials

Abstract

Bidirectional texture function (BTF) provides a realistic representation for real-world materials; however, the representation does not allow users to append additional rendering effects to the BTF data in a simple and effective way. In this paper, we present an approach for generating the painted appearance on a material that is represented by a BTF. We first convert a BTF into a physical representation composed of a height-field and a spatially varying bidirectional reflectance distribution function (SVBRDF). This representation allows us to simulate the appearance of paints on the surface of a material by computing the reflectance and the height field of the painted material. During rendering, we combine an existing BTF rendering approach and the modified material data to simulate the painted appearance of the BTF materials. Our experiments show that the proposed approach can simulate the painted appearance of a material while preserving the characteristic appearance of the original BTF. Our approach is mainly suitable for less specular BTF materials that allow depth reconstruction.