ProgramAn ode to Pixar Renderman’s — Physically Plausible Pig
March 8, 2015 - 8:35 pm by Joss Whittle C/C++ Graphics PhD
After succumbing to a bit of a slump in research productivity over the last week or two it feels great to be making progress again.
Finally I have a fully functional implementation of Bidirectional path tracing with some basic multiple importance sampling for the path weights. To celebrate having this new renderer in the code base I decided to have another crack at implementing a ceramic like shader. In the past I had modeled this material in geometry by placing a diffuse textured sphere inside an ever so slightly larger glass sphere to model the glaze/polish of the material. However, this method was a clunky approximation and severely limited the complexity of the models which it could be applied to.
This time I modeled a blended BRDF between a lambertian diffuse under-layer and an anisotropic glossy over-layer to represent the painted ceramic glaze. The amount of each BRDF used for each interaction is modulated by a Fresnel term on the incident direction. This means that looking straight at the surface will show mostly the coloured under-layer, while looking at glancing angles will show mostly the glossy over-layer.
The final, most important, part of this shader however is the bump map applied to it. Originally I rendered this scene without bump mapping, and while the material seemed plausible it looked almost too perfect. To break up the edges of reflections and to allow the surface of the material to “grab” onto a bit more light the effect of the material becomes and order of magnitude more convincing.