Walt Disney Animation Studios Launches Open Source BRDF Explorer
August 10,2012Walt Disney Animation Studios (WDAS) is making its breakthrough BRDF Explorer available to the industry through a new open source site (github.com/wdas/brdf), it was announced August 7, 2012, at SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles by Brent Burley, the project’s principal engineer from WDAS software group. BRDF Viewer is an application that allows the development and analysis of bidirectional reflectance distribution functions (BRDFs).

It can load and plot analytic BRDF functions (coded as snippets of OpenGL GLSL programs), measured material data from the MERL database, and anisotropic measured material data from MIT CSAIL.According to Burley,“We developed the BRDF Explorer to gain an intuition about the large number of BRDF models that have been developed over the years, to understand how well they fit real-world materials, and more importantly, see where they fall short. During this process, we discovered new ways to view the BRDF data more intuitively and holistically, and gained insights that allowed us to develop a robust new model. Somewhat surprisingly, our artists have also found this to be a very useful tool for crafting materials. We are happy to contribute this back to the graphics community and are excited to see what new BRDF innovations this tool will inspire.”