Modelling and Visualisation of the Optical Properties of Cloth

Cloth and garment visualisations are widely used in fashion and interior design, entertaining, automotive and nautical industry and are indispensable elements of visual communication. Modern appearance models attempt to offer a complete solution for the visualisation of complex cloth properties. In the review part of the chapter, advanced methods that enable visualisation at micron resolution, methods used in three-dimensional (3D) visualisation workflow and methods used for research purposes are presented. Within the review, those methods offering a comprehensive approach and experiments on explicit clothes attributes that present specific optical phenomenon are analysed. The review of appearance models includes surface and image-based models, volumetric and explicit models. Each group is presented with the representative authors' research group and the application and limitations of the methods. In the final part of the chapter, the visualisation of cloth specularity and porosity with an uneven surface is studied. The study and visualisation was performed using image data obtained with photography. The acquisition of structure information on a large scale namely enables the recording of structure irregularities that are very common on historical textiles, laces and also on artistic and experimental pieces of cloth. The contribution ends with the presentation of cloth visualised with the use of specular and alpha maps, which is the result of the image processing workflow.