A system for interactive display and rendering of BRDF models

Master Specialization: Visualization, Virtual Reality and Graphic Interaction
Topic Aproval date: 18/02/09
Orientation: research

Student: Adrià Forés
Thesis advisor(s): Sumanta Pattanaik, Carles Bosch
Contact:

This master thesis will focus on the development of a modular system to display and render complex bidirectional reflectance distribution functions (BRDF). The system will be able to handle BRDFs defined in a variety of forms (physically based models, analytical models, measured data etc.), and interactively display the BRDF lobes as a function of incident angles. User may also be able to manipulate model specific parameter(s) if any. The lobe displaying will be coupled with a GPU based interactive renderer to render these BRDFs over complex geometric models and under different lighting conditions. Fitting complex BRDFs with simpler BRDF models will be an important key aspect for this, and different models will need to be evaluated in order to obtain the best results. The purpose is to make available to the rendering community both a tool for modeling and fitting materials, and provide access to a set of complex physically-based BRDFs not currently used by the community.