Finding Relevant Parameters in the Reflectance of Composite Materials

Contact:

Master II Thesis -- 2022/2023

This master thesis will last 6 months, and starts in Feb. 2023.

The student will be working at INRIA Rhone-Alpes, near Grenoble, France. Advisor: Cyril Soler.

The work takes place in collaboration with Owens Corning (Chambery). Depending on results during the Master II thesis, the work may continue on a fully funded CIFFRE PhD starting from Sept. 2023. A successful master II candidate will be considered first, for this thesis.

Work plan

The goal of the master II period is to build preliminary tools for the work, and explore/experiment relationships between physical parameters of composite materials and their overall--macroscale--reflectance.
  1. Generate/acquire a geometric model of a composite material.

    This data may be either generated using procedural modeling, or obtained from CT scans provided by Owen's Corning. At the time of writing this, there is no such CT scans available, so the candidate will need to generate his own testing data.

  2. simulate he macro-scale reflectance (a.k.a. BRDF) using path tracing.

    The candidate will use an existing pathtracer that already handles loading of complex geometry, intersections, etc. The data from the path tracer will however need to be interpreted/converted into a proper reflectance function.

  3. study the influence of physical parameters.

    Composite materials come with various physical parameters: refractive index of the different components, orient and directional homogeneity of the fibers, thickness of layers, etc. The goal of this step is to figure out which of these parameters have a conclusive influence on the final appearance of the material.

  4. use computed BRDFs to generate global illumination images in virtual scenes

    5. In the master thesis, this step mostly serves illustrative purposes. In the PhD thesis that will follow, the generation of predictive rendering will be one of the goals.

Requirements

The candidate should be proficient in C++, able to work as a team, and show some autonomy in the work. The candidate should speak english or french.

Application procedure:

It is essential to contact me and come at INRIA (Montbonnot) to discuss the subject.