Readings on Physically Based Rendering

Over the past two years I’ve done quite a bit of reading on Physically Based Rendering (PBR) and I have collected a lot of references and links which I’ve always had in the back of my mind to share through this blog but never got around doing it. Christmas holidays is probably the best chance I’ll have so I might as well do it now. The list is by no means exhaustive, if you think that I have missed any important references please add them with a comment and I will update it.

An educational, normalised, Blinn-Phong shader

Recently I had a discussion with an artist about Physically based rendering and the normalized BlinnPhong reflection model. He seemed to have some trouble visualising how it works and the impact it might have in-game.

So I dug into my shader toybox, where I keep lots of them in there and occasionally take them out to play, found a normalized BlinnPhong one and modified it a bit so as to add “switches” to its various components. Then I gave it to him to play with in FX composer and get a feeling of the impact of the various features. After a while he admitted that it helped him understand how a PBR-based reflection works a bit better, and also that a normalized specular model is better than a plain one. One artist down, a few thousands to convert!