Efficient Rendering of Spatial Bi-directional Reflectance Distribution Functions

Abstract

We propose texture maps that contain at each texel all the parameters of a Lafortune representation BRDF as a compact, but quite general surface appearance representation. We describe a method for rendering such surfaces rapidly on current graphics hardware and demonstrate the method with real, measured surfaces and hand-painted surfaces. We also propose a method of rendering such spatial bi-directional reflectance distribution functions using prefiltered environment maps. Only one set of maps is required for rendering the different BRDFs stored at each texel over the surface.