An efficient representation of complex materials for real-time rendering

In this paper, we propose an appearance representation for general complex materials which can be applied in real-time rendering framework. By combining a single parametric shading function (such as the Phong model) and the proposed spatial-varying residual function (SRF), this representation can recover the appearance of complex materials with little loss of visual fidelity. The difference between the real data and the parametric shading is directly fitted by a specific function for easy reconstruction. It is simple, flexible and easy to be implemented on programmable graphics hardware. Experiments show that the mean square error (MSE) between the reconstructed appearance and real photographs is less than 5%. Copyright 2004 ACM.