Photo realism in computer generated imagery is crucially dependent on how well an artist is able to recreate real-world materials in the scene. The workflow for material modeling and editing typically involves manual tweaking of material parameters and uses a standard path tracing engine for visual feedback. A lot of time may be spent in iterative selection and rendering of materials at an appropriate quality. In this work, we propose a convolutional neural network based workflow which quickly generates high-quality ray traced material visualizations on a shaderball. Our novel architecture allows for control over environment lighting and assists material selection along with the ability to render spatially-varying materials. Additionally, our network enables control over environment lighting which gives an artist more freedom and provides better visualization of the rendered material. Comparison with state-of-the-art denoising and neural rendering techniques suggests that our neural renderer performs faster and better. We provide a interactive visualization tool and release our training dataset to foster further research in this area.
@article{arxiv.1908.09530,
title = {A Flexible Neural Renderer for Material Visualization},
author = {Aakash KT and Parikshit Sakurikar and Saurabh Saini and P. J. Narayanan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.09530},
year = {2019}
}