Colloquium
"The Science of Material Appearance in Computer Graphics"
Steve Marschner, Cornell University
Thursday, September 13, 2007 at 4:00 P.M.
Room 368 (CIT 3rd Floor)
Why do materials look the way they do? Getting clear answers to this question is one of the fundamental problems of realistic computer graphics, because rendering accurate images requires accurate models for light reflection. Even whe plausible realism is the goal rather than accuracy, the easiest path to consistently real-looking images of complex natural objects, such as people and other creatures in everyday environments, is by using accurate models for light reflection.
Many manmade materials are easy to simulate because of their simple structure, but this talk focuses on the materials that are not so easy: skin, hair, cloth plants, wood -- all these materials have complex, three-dimensional structure that determine how light reflects from them. I'll discuss two related threads: measuring and analytically modeling reflection from structures like hair, wood, and cloth; and numerically simulating light propagation through materials like hair, foam, or sand that are too complex to treat as collections of surfaces yet too coarse-grained to treat as continua.
Joint work with Adam Arbree, Piti Irawan, Jon Moon, Bruce Walter, and Steve Westin.
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Steve Marschner is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. He received his Sc.B. in Mathematics and Computer Science from Brown University in 1993 and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell in 1998, then held research positions at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Microsoft Research, and Stanford University before joining the Cornell faculty in 2002. He is the recipient of a 2003 Technical Achievement Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, an NSF CAREER award in 2004, and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in 2006.
Host: John Hughes
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