Printing Reflectance Functions

Tom Malzbender*, Ramin Samadani*, Steven Scher', Adam Crume', Douglas Dunn", and James Davis'
ACM Transactions on Graphics, May 2012.
To be presented at Siggraph 2012 in the Appearance session (August 6, 3:45-5:35pm)

* Hewlett Packard Labs              ' UC Santa Cruz              " 3M
Abstract:

The reflectance function of a scene point captures the appearance of that point as a function of lighting direction. We present an approach to printing the reflectance functions of an object or scene so that its appearance is modified correctly as a function of the lighting conditions when viewing the print. For example, such a .photograph. of a statue printed with our approach appears to cast shadows to the right when the .photograph. is illuminated from the left. Viewing the same print with lighting from the right will cause the statue.s shadows to be cast to the left. Beyond shadows, all effects due to the lighting variation, such as Lambertian shading, specularity, and inter-reflection can be reproduced. We achieve this ability by geometrically and photometrically controlling specular highlights on the surface of the print. For a particular viewpoint, arbitrary reflectance functions can be built up at each pixel by controlling only the specular highlights and avoiding significant diffuse reflections. Our initial binary prototype uses halftoning to approximate continuous grayscale reflectance functions.

Download: PDF Video BibTex

Watch the 1-minute Introductory Video on Youtube


Watch the 3-minute Technical Video on Youtube


Cite as:

Malzbender, T., Samadani, R., Scher, S., Crume, A., Dunn, D., and Davis, J. 2012. Printing reflectance functions. ACM Trans. Graph. 31, 3, Article 20 (May 2012)

View Paper at ACM Transactions on Graphics Page


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