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VLMaterial: Procedural Material Generation with Large Vision-Language Models (arxiv.org)
26 points by eamag on Feb 24, 2025 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Materials like wood or metal are built as node graphs; this turns each graph into a Python program and trains an image-reading AI to write those programs from a photo. It beat earlier image-to-material tools on both computer-made and real-world examples.

Abstract

Procedural materials, represented as functional node graphs, are ubiquitous in computer graphics for photorealistic material appearance design. They allow users to perform intuitive and precise editing to achieve desired visual appearances. However, creating a procedural material given an input image requires professional knowledge and significant effort. In this work, we leverage the ability to convert procedural materials into standard Python programs and fine-tune a large pre-trained vision-language model (VLM) to generate such programs from input images. To enable effective fine-tuning, we also contribute an open-source procedural material dataset and propose to perform program-level augmentation by prompting another pre-trained large language model (LLM). Through extensive evaluation, we show that our method outperforms previous methods on both synthetic and real-world examples.

Beichen Li, Rundi Wu, Armando Solar-Lezama, Changxi Zheng, Liang Shi, Bernd Bickel, Wojciech Matusik
arXiv:2501.18623 · cs.CV, cs.GR · submitted Jan 27, 2025 · updated Feb 18, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · ICLR 2025 Spotlight

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