A PCA Decomposition for Real-time BRDF Editing and Relighting with Global Illumination

Abstract

We propose a novel rendering method which supports interactive BRDF editing as well as relighting on a 3D scene. For interactive BRDF editing, we linearize an analytic BRDF model with basis BRDFs obtained from a principal component analysis. For each basis BRDF, the radiance transfer is precomputed and stored in vector form. In rendering time, illumination of a point is computed by multiplying the radiance transfer vectors of the basis BRDFs by the incoming radiance from gather samples and then linearly combining the results weighted by user-controlled parameters. To improve the level of accuracy, a set of sub-area samples associated with a gather sample refines the glossy reflection of the geometric details without increasing the precomputation time. We demonstrate this program with a number of examples to verify the real-time performance of relighting and BRDF editing on 3D scenes with complex lighting and geometry.