Visual computing encompasses a multitude of subjects which have evolved around a common goal: creating and understanding worlds with pictures. Recently, appearance fabrication has emerged as an exciting topic in visual computing: it addresses how to employ rapid manufacturing techniques in order to build tangible artifacts which have a predefined appearance.

In this talk, I will present my contributions to appearance manufacturing, discussing passive reflectance field displays and printed subsurface scattering. Further, I will show how the use of rapid manufacturing techniques for computational photography enables refocusing images after they were taken.