Advanced materials

Hi,

We need more advanced material rendering and know that the only way to go beyond ambient/diffuse/specular/shininess are shaders.

We need the best link or book on the subject to implement realistic materials with OpenGL.

There are many books on shaders but we need only the best one that focus on advanced material rendering (not raytracing).

Thanks for any useful link you can provide!

Alberto

I found these pdf were a real eye-opener for realistic rendering :
http://renderwonk.com/publications/s2010-shading-course/

This book looks interesting too but I have only read some excerpts :
http://realtimerendering.com/index.html

There is no single definition of “best” by which you could objectively categorize materials on rendering. Real-time rendering is not a solved problem for which there is a single perfect solution that works great in all cases.

As a graphics programmer, it is your responsibility to learn rendering techniques and decide for yourself and your particular needs what constitutes “best”. And then implement those techniques.

So your question is simply not answerable. There is no “best book” that you could find. You will simply have to do the same work other graphics programmers do: learn techniques and use them where appropriate.

You have also failed to define what you consider to be “advanced material rendering.” The way you stated that you wanted to go “beyond ambient/diffuse/specular/shininess” suggests that you may not be aware of what these things all really mean (since you’re probably not going to get “beyond” diffuse and specular reflectance), how they fit into a lighting equation, and what they approximate in reality.

Take subsurface scattering. This is just a form of diffuse reflectance. It isn’t the Lambertian diffuse equation of course, but it is still modelling diffuse surface reflections of light. The Cook-Torrance specular model is better than Blinn-Phong, but they’re both still modelling specular reflectance; one simply does a better job.

Thanks Alfonse,

Take Bi-directional Reflectance Distribution Functions for example, can this be the natural extension of OpenGL basic materials? In the history of the many 3D graphics/CAD programs out there what was the evolution of material rendering?

Thanks,

Alberto

The evolution have been to create material through a graph of basic operation and algorithms, giving a lot of freedom to the artist.
Something like this :
http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-242/blender-material-nodes/

Thanks again ZbuffeR.

This topic was automatically closed 183 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.