Frequency Space Methods for General Surface Modeling

EDIC candidacy exam
Exam president: Prof. Mark Pauly
Thesis advisor: Prof. Wenzel Jakob
Co-examiner: Prof. Sabine Süsstrunk

Abstract
Current light transport simulations rely on good material models to describe the rendered scenes. In the case of surface rendering, these are usually described by bidirectional scattering distribution functions (BSDFs). However, most state-of-the-art BSDFs lack the complexity that real materials in the world around us offer. In our current research, we focus on the subclass of layered materials by combining simple existing models into more interesting looking materials.
In this proposal, we discuss three relevant background papers. The first lays the foundation of our ongoing research by describing a framework for handling layered materials. The second paper extends commonly used microfacet based BSDFs with multiple-scattering. Lastly, we cover a paper that presents an effective acquisition technique for anisotropic BSDFs with extremely few samples.

Background papers
A Comprehensive Framework for Rendering Layered Materials (Jakob et al. 2014)
Minimal Sampling for Effective Acquisition of Anisotropic BRDFs (Vávra and Filip 2016)
Multiple-Scattering Microfacet BSDFs with the Smith Model (Heitz et al. 2016)