Interactive Exploration of Vivid Material Iridescence using Bragg Mirrors

Many animals, plants or gems exhibit iridescent material appearance in nature. These are due to specific geometric structures at scales comparable to visible wavelengths, yielding so‐called structural colors. The most vivid examples are due to photonic crystals, where a same structure is repeated in...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Computer graphics forum 2024-05, Vol.43 (2), p.n/a
Main Authors: Fourneau, G., Pacanowski, R., Barla, P.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
CCS Concepts
Complexity
Computer Science
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computing methodologies → Reflectance modeling
Gems
Iridescence
Optics
Photonic crystals
Physics
Reflectance
Rendering
Thin films
Transfer matrices
Citations: Items that this one cites
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Summary:Many animals, plants or gems exhibit iridescent material appearance in nature. These are due to specific geometric structures at scales comparable to visible wavelengths, yielding so‐called structural colors. The most vivid examples are due to photonic crystals, where a same structure is repeated in one, two or three dimensions, augmenting the magnitude and complexity of interference effects. In this paper, we study the appearance of 1D photonic crystals (repetitive pairs of thin films), also called Bragg mirrors. Previous work has considered the effect of multiple thin films using the classical transfer matrix approach, which increases in complexity when the number of repetitions increases. Our first contribution is to introduce a more efficient closed‐form reflectance formula [Yeh88] for Bragg mirror reflectance to the Graphics community, as well as an approximation that lends itself to efficient spectral integration for RGB rendering. We then explore the appearance of stacks made of rough Bragg layers. Here our contribution is to show that they may lead to a ballistic transmission, significantly speeding up position‐free rendering and leading to an efficient single‐reflection BRDF model.
ISSN:0167-7055
1467-8659
DOI:10.1111/cgf.15017