Modeling and rendering of realistic feathers

  • Authors:

  • Yanyun Chen;Yingqing Xu;Baining Guo;Heung-Yeung Shum

  • Affiliations:

  • Microsoft Research Asia, 3F Beijing Sigma Center, Haidian District, Beijing 100080, P R China;Microsoft Research Asia, 3F Beijing Sigma Center, Haidian District, Beijing 100080, P R China;Microsoft Research Asia, 3F Beijing Sigma Center, Haidian District, Beijing 100080, P R China;Microsoft Research Asia, 3F Beijing Sigma Center, Haidian District, Beijing 100080, P R China

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 29th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

We present techniques for realistic modeling and rendering of feathers and birds. Our approach is motivated by the observation that a feather is a branching structure that can be described by an L-system. The parametric L-system we derived allows the user to easily create feathers of different types and shapes by changing a few parameters. The randomness in feather geometry is also incorporated into this L-system. To render a feather realistically, we have derived an efficient form of the bidirectional texture function (BTF), which describes the small but visible geometry details on the feather blade. A rendering algorithm combining the L-system and the BTF displays feathers photorealistically while capitalizing on graphics hardware for efficiency. Based on this framework of feather modeling and rendering, we developed a system that can automatically generate appropriate feathers to cover different parts of a bird's body from a few "key feathers" supplied by the user, and produce realistic renderings of the bird.