A Survey of Shading and Reflectance Models

Abstract

Since the beginning of computer graphics, three decades ago, a large number of models intended to describe the behaviour of light on a given point of a surface have been proposed. Almost every author uses his own terminology and/or notation. To understand clearly the similarities and the differences between existing models, reformulating them with a unified notation is essential. This has been done by Hall in 1986. This paper is a new survey of shading and reflectance models, including the most recent models. Moreover, after the lengthy enumeration, some original models are proposed, which attempt to include interesting features of previous disjointed work into new formulations.