We present a novel example-based material appearance modeling method suitable for rapid digital content creation. Our
method only requires a single HDR photograph of a homogeneous isotropic dielectric exemplar object under known natural
illumination. While conventional methods for appearance modeling require prior knowledge on the object shape, our method
does not, nor does it recover the shape explicitly, greatly simplifying on-site appearance acquisition to a lightweight photography process suited for non-expert users. As our central contribution, we propose a shape-agnostic BRDF estimation procedure
based on binary RGB profile matching. We also model the appearance of materials exhibiting a regular or stationary texture-like
appearance, by synthesizing appropriate mesostructure from the same input HDR photograph and a mesostructure exemplar
with (roughly) similar features. We believe our lightweight method for on-site shape-agnostic appearance acquisition presents
a suitable alternative for a variety of applications that require plausible “rapid-appearance-modeling”