The Simulation of Paint Cracking and Peeling


Eric Paquette, Pierre Poulin, and George Drettakis
Graphics Interface, pages 59-68, 2002.

Abstract

Weathering over long periods of time results in cracking and peeling of layers such as paint. To include these effects in computer graphics images it is necessary to simulate crack propagation, loss of adhesion, and the curling effect of paint peeling. We present a new approach which computes such a simulation on surfaces. Our simulation is inspired by the underlying physical properties. We use paint strength and tensile stress to determine where cracks appear on the surface. Cracks are then propagated through a 2D grid overlaid on the original surface, and we consider elasticity to compute the reduction of paint stress around the cracks. Simulation of the adhesion between the paint and the underlying material finally determines how the paint layer curls as it peels from the surface. The result of this simulation is rendered by generating explicit geometry to represent the peeling curls. We provide user control of the surface properties influencing the propagation of cracks. Results of our simulation and rendering method show that our approach produces convincing images of cracks and peels.

Keywords

Deteriorations, surface imperfections, paint, cracks, multi-layer surfaces, natural phenomena.

BibTeX entry

@InProceedings{Paquette:2002:SPC,
  author =       "Eric Paquette and Pierre Poulin and George Drettakis",
  title =        "The Simulation of Paint Cracking and Peeling",
  booktitle =    "Graphics Interface 2002 Conference Proceedings",
  year =         "2002",
  pages =        "59--68",
}

Online version

Adobe PDF version of the paper, 10Mb.

Additional material

Electronic versions of the presentation. In its original PowerPoint version (1.5Mb). Printed in PDF format with one slide per page (0.7Mb) or with six slides per page (0.5Mb).

An image from our results appears on the GI 2002 Proceedings cover. A closeup view of paint peeling on a plasterd wall appears on the back of the proceedings cover.

Movies shown during the presentation.

Code of the Maya plugins used to generate and render the peels.



Last modified: Tue Feb 11 16:55:33 Eastern Standard Time 2003