Optimizing BRDF Orientations for the Manipulation of Anisotropic Highlights

Boris Raymond (1, 2, 3) , Gaël Guennebaud (1, 2, 3) , Pascal Barla (1, 2, 3) , Romain Pacanowski (3, 4) , Xavier Granier (3, 4)

1 LaBRI - Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique
2 LP2N - Laboratoire Photonique, Numérique et Nanosciences
3 MANAO - Melting the frontiers between Light, Shape and Matter
4 lp2n-05

This paper introduces a system for the direct editing of highlights produced by anisotropic BRDFs, which we call anisotropic highlights. We first provide a comprehensive analysis of the link between the direction of anisotropy and the shape of highlight curves for arbitrary object surfaces. The gained insights provide the required ingredients to infer BRDF orientations from a prescribed highlight tangent field. This amounts to a non-linear optimization problem, which is solved at interactive framerates during manipulation. Taking inspiration from sculpting software, we provide tools that give the impression of manipulating highlight curves while actually modifying their tangents. Our solver produces desired highlight shapes for a host of lighting environments and anisotropic BRDFs.

Domaines: Synthèse d'image et réalité virtuelle [cs.GR]

Boris Raymond, Gaël Guennebaud, Pascal Barla, Romain Pacanowski, Xavier Granier. Optimizing BRDF Orientations for the Manipulation of Anisotropic Highlights. Computer Graphics Forum, 2014. ⟨hal-00933264v1⟩