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BRDF Symbols


What style would you like to see used at the wiki?  

21 members have voted

  1. 1. What style would you like to see used at the wiki?

    • Strictly shader writer style
      4
    • Strictly academic style
      0
    • Consistently shader style, but with a mapping to academia
      7
    • Consistently academic, but with a mapping to shader style
      10


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Hi all,

I started sketching the entry on Reflectance Functions (BRDFs) over at the wiki, and suddenly I'm faced with a bit of a labeling conundrum...

See; all the literature out there tends to use certain symbols to refer to things like the incidence vector, the reflection vector, etc. Problem is, the conventions they've developed over the years are *not* the same as what shader writers have come up with -- so that, where a shader writer has grown up calling the direction to the viewer "V", a SIGGRAPH paper will refer to it using some Greek letter instead. Neither camp is totally consistent, but they are somewhat uniform nonetheless.

My current thinking is that you'd want to be exposed to both, so that translating someone else's BRDF from SL for example, feels familiar (i.e: you recognize the variable names right away), and when checking out some siggraph paper you don't feel totally lost...

I'm just as comfortable with both styles, so I don't have any strong opinions either way. But I recognize that it is something that could have a big impact on someone who is just starting to read up on the subject. The way I was headed with it was going to follow choice 4: "Consistently academic, but with a mapping to shader style". But if you hate that idea, then this would be a good time to say so. ;)

Cheers!

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Hmmmm...

OK. Let me ask it another way then:

Do any of the people who voted for #3 find any of what's already there incredibly confusing?

It's just that I'm thinking ahead to when it turns fully 3D and I have to introduce solid angles, differential areas, polar coordinates, and all that jazz... there won't be any "shader-style" equivalent at that point anyway, and if I haven't warmed you up to the idea of seeing Greek symbols by that point, then it will suddenly all feel threatening, and you might just "tune out"...

Unless I hear a good reason against it, I think I'll stick to #4 then... I just have to make sure I do a good job of making the mapping to shader-style really clear... maybe I'll pepper the early stuff with VEX snippets to get everyone comfy with the duality in terminology...

Cheers!

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Thanks Jason :)

But as I said before, if anyone is drawing a resounding "HUH?!?" from the whole thing (or parts of it), then please let me know. I'm about to start to tie things in to the application side now (shaders), so I'm particularly interested to hear if I start loosing people there, since, if that bridge fails, then the whole thing is kind'a doomed...

Cheers!

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