GPU Gems 2: Programming Techniques for High-Performance Graphics and General-Purpose Computation

Chapter 11. Approximate Bidirectional Texture Functions

Jan KautzMassachusetts Institute of Technology

In this chapter we present a technique for the easy acquisition and rendering of realistic materials, such as cloth, wool, and leather. These materials are difficult to render with previous techniques, which mostly rely on simple texture maps. The goal is to spend little effort on acquisition and little computation on rendering but still achieve realistic appearances.

Our method, which is based on recent work by Kautz et al. (2004), arises from the observation that under certain circumstances, the material of a surface can be acquired with very few images, yielding results similar to those achieved with full bidirectional texture functions (or ...