Importance sampling of products from illumination and BRDF using spherical radial basis functions

In this paper, a new approach for the importance sampling of products from a complex high dynamic range (HDR) environment map and measured bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) data using spherical radial basis functions (SRBFs) is presented. In the pre-process, a complex HDR environment map and measured BRDF data are transformed into a scattered SRBF representation by using a non-uniform and non-negative SRBF fitting algorithm. An initial guess is determined for the fitting operation. In the run-time rendering process, after the product of the two SRBFs is evaluated, this is used to guide the number of samples. The sampling is done by mixing samples from the various “product” SRBFs using multiple importance sampling. Hence, the proposed approach efficiently renders images with multiple HDR environment maps and measured BRDFs.