sLayer: a System for Multi-Layered Material Sculpting

Many real world materials have a stratified structure, composed by the proximity and the interaction of multiple highly-detailed layers. Example of these materials are peeling paint, old tree bark and rusted metals. While digital sculpting is particularly well-suited to model these aged surfaces, the interaction between layers is not accounted for. We present a system for sculpting multi-layers materials where collision between layers are handled interactively while brushing meshes that scales up to the million of polygons necessary to model aged surfaces. We do so by observing that if the average mean edge length is maintained constant throughout the modeling session, we can use a single data structure, namely a uniform grid, to accelerate all the sculpting operations. We present a brush rasterization pipeline that uses this data structure for multi-layer editing. We also show that by adding a few interface tools for layer creation and selection, we can create detailed surface similar to real-world ones. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to show sculpting of highly-detailed, multi-layered materials in real-time.