hi everyone,
I am looking for software that allows you to render a scene of complex geometry (more than spheres/boxes) with surface properties defined by Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Functions. A user should be able to use or define a BRDF such as cook-torrence, Lafortune etc. as material properties for the geometry in the scene. Most importantly be able to control parameters interactively and have reasonable response time.
At the moment, I don’t have the necessary software/hardware combination to try out things like ATI rendermonkey, NVidia CG examples, Lumina (http://lumina.sourceforge.net), Stanford’s BRDF browser bv (bv - a BRDF browser).
I don’t have Maya, Autodesk, Renderman or anything particularly fancy to play with. But the latest blender 2.5 has some BRDF capabilities, I am yet to build this for my humbly crappy macbook pro.
I was able to run some examples using Physically Based Rendering Toolkit PBRT (http://www.pbrt.org/), 3Delight (http://www.3delight.com/en/). This is raytraced and not interactive enough
I found some more relevant academic works:
Ben-Artzi, Aner; Overbeck, Ryan; Ramamoorthi, Ravi. Real-Time BRDF Editing in Complex Lighting. ACM Transactions on Graphics, July 2006 (SIGGRAPH 2006).
Mark Colbert, Sumanta Pattanaik, and Jaroslav Krivanek. Brdf-shop: Creating physically correct bidirectional reflectance distribution functions. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Vol. 26, No. 1. January/February 2006
NIST has application/source code for their comprehensive OBL Oregon BRDF Library
I have contacted many of the academics if they would allow the use of this software for non-commercial purposes…I don’t expect a response anytime soon
Questions that some of you may be able to answer:
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Having not implemented anything shader fancy myself, would it be difficult to take an existing OpenGL program (i have already) that can be extended to implement the BRDF effects?
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Does anyone know of other software that may be of relevance? (hardware/platform not an issue)
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Would there be a more appropriate forum/persons to ask about this software?
Thank you for enduring this long post. Any help is greatly appreciated.
lordmule