Materials, Lighting, and the BRDF
The analogy of a 3D scene to a real-world movie studio set is an obvious but useful one. Some parts are obvious, such as the scene and stage, cameras, and lights, while others are not. Meshes are the actors and the set pieces, while materials are their costumes. This section is all about the costuming and lights, but it’s tough to discuss either without digging down a bit into the theoretical underpinnings of how light gets modeled in a scene.
This section is a bit of a doozy, so here’s a quick fly-over of what we’re going to talk about. First, we’re going to dabble with a little bit of symbolic mathematics and some extremely light calculus. Next, we’ll look at the different ways that light can reflect and interact with surfaces, and how it’s modeled or approximated in 3D. This will serve as a strong basis for us to learn about Materials and how they relate to math at a high level. After that, we will introduce...
