Inverse bi-scale material design

Abstract

One major shortcoming of existing bi-scale material design systems is the lack of support for inverse design: there is no way to directly edit the large-scale appearance and then rapidly solve for the small-scale details that approximate that look. Prior work is either too slow to provide quick feedback, or limited in the types of small-scale details that can be handled. We present a novel computational framework for inverse bi-scale material design. The key idea is to convert the challenging inverse appearance computation into efficient search in two precomputed large libraries: one including a wide range of measured and analytical materials, and the other procedurally generated and height-map-based geometries. We demonstrate a variety of editing operations, including finding visually equivalent details that produce similar large-scale appearance, which can be useful in applications such as physical fabrication of materials.