Procedural generation of materials for real-time rendering

The use of Procedural Content Generation techniques in the production of Video Games has seen a large diffusion in these last years. Regarding the procedural generation of Computer Graphics content, several works have been proposed about the automatic construction of complex models and environments, or about the instancing of several copies of a reference model, each with peculiar differences to introduce variety. However, very few works have proposed techniques for the procedural production of complex materials to be assigned to these generated models. In this paper, we present a method for the automatic generation of realistic layered materials based on the application of a Genetic Algorithm. We show that, with the proposed approach, is possible to generate several instances of a target material (e.g., a car paint, or a rusty metal), maintaining a desired level of closeness to the overall characteristics of the simulated interaction between the light and the surface, but introducing also a controlled amount of differences in the final reproduction of the perceived appearance.