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GI 2000 Online Papers



Approximation of Glossy Reflection with Prefiltered Environment Maps

Jan Kautz and Michael D. McCool

Abstract

A method is presented that can render glossy reflections with arbitrary isotropic bidirectional reflectance distribution functions (BRDFs) at interactive rates using texture mapping. This method is based on the well-known environment map technique for specular reflections.

Our approach uses a single- or multilobe representation of bidirectional reflectance distribution functions, where the shape of each radially symmetric lobe is also a function of view elevation. This approximate representation can be computed efficiently using local greedy fitting techniques. Each lobe is used to filter specular environment maps during a preprocessing step, resulting in a three-dimensional environment map. For many BRDFs, simplifications using lower-dimensional approximations, coarse sampling with respect to view elevation, and small numbers of lobes can still result in a convincing approximation to the true surface reflectance.

The Paper

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