09: Materials
The BRDFs and BTDFs introduced in the previous chapter address only part of the problem of describing how a surface scatters light. Although they describe how light is scattered at a particular point on a surface, the renderer needs to determine which BRDFs and BTDFs are present at a point on a surface and what their parameters are. In this chapter, we describe a procedural shading mechanism that addresses this issue.
The basic idea behind pbrt’s approach is that a surface shader is bound to each primitive in the scene. The surface shader is represented by an instance of the Material interface class, which has a method that takes a point on a surface and creates a BSDF object (and possibly a BSSRDF) that represents scattering at ...
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