A Microfacet-Based BRDF Generator," Computer Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2000 Proceedings)

http://www.cs.utah.edu/~shirley/papers/facets.pdf

abstract
a method is presented that takes as an input a 2D microfacet orientation distribution and produces a 4D bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) this method differs from previous microfacet-based BRDF models in that it uses a simple shadowing term which allows it to handle very general microfacet distributions while maintaining reciprocity 可逆性 and energy conservation. the generator is shown on a variety of material types.

1 introduction
physically-based rendering systems describe reflection behaviors using the bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) [7]. at a given point on a surface the BRDF is a function of two directions, one toward the light and one toward the viewer. the characteristic of the BRDF will determine what “type” of material the viewer thinks the displayed object is composed of, so the choice of BRDF model and its parameters is important. there are variety of basic strategies for modeling BRDFs that we categorize as follows.

direct measurement. BRDFs can be measured directly using gonioreflectometers which mechanically vary the direction to a small light source and a spectral sensor and thus collect a large number of point samples for the BRDF[7].

microfacet methods. somewhere between the height correclation methods and empirical methods lie models based on microfacet theory[2,4]. mirofacet models assume the surface consists of a large number of small flat “micromirrors” (facets) each of which reflect light only in the specular direction. by computing the number of visible mirofacets at the appropriate orientation to specularly reflect light from the source to the viewer, one can determine the BRDF.

all of these methods have their place.

figure2: geometry of reflection. note taht k1, k2, and h share a plane, which usually does not include n. on the left, the microfacet can “see” in directions k1 and k2 so it contributes to the BRDF. on the right, direction k2 is blocked and the microfacet does not contribute. note that the microfacet distribution is not restricted to height fields.

3 Microfacet Theory
we now review the main results of microfacet theory as developed by Torrance and Sparrow [23] and later introduced to computer graphics by Cook and Torrance[4]. we follow their approach of considering a collection of microfacets of small but finite size, and we derive the basic formula for BRDF in terms of quantities convient for our model.

the quantity we wish to derive an expression for is the BRDF ρ(k1,k2) which gives the ratio of radiance observed by a viewer in the direction k2 to irradiance from infinitesimal 无穷小 solid angle about k1. Throughout the paper, all vectors are shown in bold. They
are assumed to be normalized, and all quantities with subscript 1 refer to incident direction while those with subscript 2 belong to the
outgoing direction. Both k1 and k2 and all normals point outward from the surface. If we expose the surface to a uniform radiance of
L1 coming from a small solid angle δω1 around k1, the outgoing radiance in direciton k2 will be

where n is the surface geometric normal and two vectors written next to each other in parenthesis denotes their scalar product, i.e., the cosine of the angle between them. the use of δ is not standard notation, but it is used to make the algebra 代数式 less clutterred 凌乱 without losing the gist 要点 of the argument. by the definition of radiance, if (k2n)A is the projected surface element area in the direction k2 and δE(k1->k2) is the power reflected by the surface in the direction k2, then

and BRDF can be written as

only a fraction of all microfacets will participate in scattering the energy from k1 to k2. if the number of these active microfacets is Nactive and all microfacets have the same area Amf, their total projected area in the direction of k1 is NactiveAmf(kh) and the total scattered power is

where h is the normalized half-vector between k1 and k2 and F((kh)) is Fresnel coefficient giving the fraction of incoming light which is specularly reflected by a microfacet. note that we will drop subscripts 脚标 in our notations if either of incoming and outgoing direction can be used in an expression (e.g., (kh)).

out of the total of N surface microfacets, only Np(h)δwh will have their normals oriented in the appropriate direction. the density p(h) does not specify all surface properties uniquely, but in our simplified approach this is the only characteristic of the surface we will use in our analysis. note that this function operates in the domain of microfacet normals which is different from the space of incoming and outgoing light directions. in particular, for the case of specularly reflecting microfacets, the relationship between elementary solid angles [23] can be shown to be



equation 6 is a somewhat modified version of the original result of torrance and sparrow who present its more detailed derivation[23].

the area A of the surface element can be written as a sum of the projected areas of all microfacets: