LiAR isn't a raytracer

I’m in a bit of a design dilemma right now … Currently, materials are implemented as shaders. This is similar to the RenderMan Interface. Each material is a piece of code that gets executed when the ray tracer hits the surface, and yields the outgoing radiance (the colour to be rendered). That’s great, we have maximum flexibility, and we keep open the possibility to be somewhat, more-or-less compatible to the RenderMan Interface.

Add photon mapping to the mix (or another GI thingy like path tracing, radiosity, … though radiosity might still do with the shaders above?). Suddenly, those shaders aren’t so cute anymore. Since photon mapping basically shoots a photon at a surface, and wants to know in what direction that photon will be scattered. This is very BRDF oriented. We can’t really do that with shaders, or can we?

So here’s the dilemma … abandon shaders, or come up with a solution that fits both? What solution?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 18th, 2006 at 1:51 pm and is filed under bramz' diary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.