Physically based rendering uses principles of physics to model the interaction of light with matter. Even though it is possible to achieve photorealistic renderings, it often fails to be predictive. There are two major issues: first, there is no analytic material model that considers all appearance critical characteristics; second, light is in many cases described by only 3 RGB‐samples. This leads to the problem that there are different models for different material types and that wavelength dependent phenomena are only approximated. In order to be able to analyze the influence of both problems on the appearance of real world materials, an accurate comparison between rendering and reality is necessary. Therefore, in this work, we acquired a set of precisely and spectrally resolved ground truth data. It consists of the precise description of a new developed reference scene including isotropic BRDFs of 24 color patches, as well as the reference measurements of all patches under 13 different angles inside the reference scene. Our reference data covers rough materials with many different spectral distributions and various illumination situations, from direct light to indirect light dominated situations.
Simulating light-matter interaction is a fundamental problem in computer graphics. A particular challenge is the simulation of light interaction with rough surfaces due to diffraction and multiple scattering phenomena. To properly model these phenomena, wave-optics have to be considered. Nevertheless, the most accurate BRDF models, including wave-optics, are computationally expensive, and the resulting renderings have not been systematically compared to real-world measurements. This work sheds more light on reflectance variations due to surface roughness. More specifically, we look at wavelength shifts that lead to reddish and blueish appearances. These wavelength shifts have been scarcely reported in the literature, and, in this paper, we provide the first thorough analysis from precise measured data. We measured the spectral in-plane BRDF of aluminium samples with varying roughness and further acquired the surface topography with a confocal microscope. The measurements show that the rough samples have, on average, a reddish and blueish appearance in the forward and back-scattering, respectively. Our investigations conclude that this is a diffraction-based effect that dominates the overall appearance of the samples. Simulations using a virtual gonioreflectometer further confirm our claims. We propose a linear model that can closely fit such phenomena, where the slope of the wavelength shifts depends on the incident and reflection direction. Based on these insights, we developed a simple BRDF model based on the Cook-Torrance model that considers such wavelength shifts.
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