• Korean Journal of Computational Design and Engineering
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• v.14 no.5
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• pp.346-354
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• 2009

BRDF (bidirectional reflectance distribution function) is critical in realistic simulation of material appearances since it models the directional characteristics of reflection of light. Although many BRDF models have been proposed so far, it is still not easy to find one specific model that could represent all the reflection properties of real materials such as generalized diffusion, off-specular reflection, Fresnel effect, and back scattering. In this paper, we compare three BRDF models including B-spline volume BRDF (BVB), Cook-Torrance, and Lafortune in their ability to represent the measured BRDF data for physically-based rendering. We show that B-spline volume BRDF surpass the others in quality of data fitting and rendering, especially for materials without specular reflections.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.145-149
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• 2015

A reconfigurable lighting engine for widely used lighting models is proposed for low-power GPU shaders. Conventionally, lighting operations that involve many complex arithmetic operations were calculated by the shader programs on the GPU, which led to a significant energy overhead. In this letter, we propose a lighting engine to improve the energy-efficiency by supporting the widely used advanced lighting models in hardware. It supports the Blinn-Phong, Oren-Nayar, and Cook-Torrance models, by exploiting the logarithmic arithmetic and optimizing the trigonometric function evaluations for the energy-efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate 12.7%, 42.5%, and 35.5% reductions in terms of power-delay product from the shader program implementations for each lighting model. Moreover, our work shows 10.1% higher energy-efficiency for the Blinn-Phong model compared to the prior art.