Simulating the appearance of woven fabrics is challenging due to the complex interplay of lighting between the constituent yarns and fibers. Conventional surface-based models lack the fidelity and details for producing realistic close-up renderings. Micro-appearance models, on the other hand, can produce highly detailed renderings by depicting fabrics fiber-by-fiber, but become expensive when handling large pieces of clothing. Further, neither surface-based nor micro-appearance model has not been shown in practice to match measurements of complex anisotropic reflection and transmission simultaneously.

In this paper, we introduce a practical appearance model for woven fabrics. We model the structure of a fabric at the ply level and simulate the local appearance of fibers making up each ply. Our model accounts for both reflection and transmission of light and is capable of matching physical measurements better than prior methods including fiber based techniques. Compared to existing micro-appearance models, our model is light-weight and scales to large pieces of clothing.

• Paper: pdf (104 MB)
• Paper (reduced res.): pdf (9 MB)

@article{Montazeri:2020:PlyBasedCloth,
  title={A Practical Ply-Based Appearance Model of Woven Fabrics},
  author={Montazeri, Zahra and Gammelmark, S{\o}ren B. and Zhao, Shuang and Jensen, Henrik Wann},
  journal={ACM Trans. Graph.},
  volume={39},
  number={6},
  year={2020},
  pages={251:1--251:13}
}

We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. We thank Dries Vervoort and Magnus Skogsfjord for providing some of the models for §6. This work was supported in part by NSF grant IIS-1813553.