The Science of CG
This article teaches you how to make your renders appear physically correct. Some tricks are very simple and give a real boost to the end result.
The Science For CG
Using physically correct route is a sign of an experienced cg-specialist.
Doing things in the physically correct way (or as close to it as understanding of physics and maths allows) means that the results are predictable.
Layering artistic hack after artistic hack into shaders quickly results in setups that are unmanageable and hard to make changes to. Moreover, if you don’t light those materials in exactly the right way (as the original shader designer intended) the results can often be bizarre or just plain broken. This is especially important when you need to share shading and lighting setups between multiple artists working on different shots and sequences.
Try to keep physical correctness for as long as possible and only branch off into ‘artistic licence’ when you absolutely have to. It makes sense studying photography and traditional lighting to know how to break the rules without breaking the physical rules.
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Great article !
Thanks a lot !
A nice article, thanks!
Good Resource of KnowHow! Thanks for sharing!
Wow, that’s a great article.
Very useful, I bookmarked this badboy.
Very nice! Thanks for the tips. This is a great reference, instant bookmark.
Choice topic, nice article and a great sunday read :)
thnx
Great stuff!
I hope in final Blender 2.5 there is more “normal” terminology than now!
Blender has very often own descriptions so the comparability to other packages is not there!
Hmm, wasn’t subdivisionmodeling.com shut down some time ago?
Very nice article.
Wow, that’s a very usefull article.
Alexander Alexandrov, Rens Heeren, playmesumch00ns.
Thanks a lot for sharing!
too bad there is no GI in blender yet D
Really nice article. I think this also sums up how important is physically based materials. i.e in Blender controlling Fresnel is bit wierd.. its not based on IOR at all.
where can I buy his book :)
awesome stuff
Does this mean that Blender will finally get a proper CookTorr specular shader instead of the current hack? I tried implementing one a while back and it was way easier to control. I may even have the patch somewhere.
Very great read. Just bookmarked it.
In terms of physical correctness, its not only the renderer that violates that. I had always been confused with the friction in the collision, cloth and softbody simulators. At school, it is represented in percent of the normal force, but in Blender simulations its not represented as such. It makes it hard to tell how much friction to place. I even think that friction could exceed the normal force. I don’t know why they do it like that but it sure is silly. Its totally illogical… and is not documented.
it was an interesting read though you could stuggle to apply half that stuff if you were using BI instead of YAFARAY.
currently BI, has no GI, the shader system is not physically based there are no BDRF or BDSSRF shaders and as someone pointed out Fresnel doesn’t even take IOR into account.
But I do use YAFARAY so this will be helpful in getting better results from that renderer.
Thanks! Glad you brought up the Overbright Problem. Many times, that’s the last hurdle before an image looks perfect.
(Small typo: “The Dolar System”) :)
Thanks guys :)… I’m happy to see that this article was useful to you. It took me quite some time to organise it, and I wasn’t sure if I make it through… though now I see the efforts were worth of it. :)
Great article