Physically based rendering

Feasible and quick approximations of the bidirectional reflectance distribution function and rendering equation are of mathematical importance in this field.

The phrase "Physically Based Rendering" was more widely popularized by Matt Pharr, Greg Humphreys, and Pat Hanrahan in their book of the same name from 2004, a seminal work in modern computer graphics that won its authors a Technical Achievement Academy Award for special effects.

One of these is that – unlike many previous models that sought to differentiate surfaces between non-reflective and reflective – PBR recognizes that, in the real world, as John Hable puts it, "everything is shiny".

[2] Today's mid to high-end hardware is capable of producing and rendering PBR content and there exists a market of easy-to-use software that allows designers of all experience levels to take advantage of physically based rendering methods, such as: A typical application provides an intuitive graphical user interface that allows artists to define and layer materials with arbitrary properties and to assign them to a given 2D or 3D object to recreate the appearance of any synthetic or organic material.

Sophisticated applications allow savvy users to write custom shaders in a shading language such as HLSL or GLSL, though increasingly node-based material editors that allow a graph-based workflow with native support for important concepts such as light position, levels of reflection and emission and metallicity, and a wide range of other math and optics functions are replacing hand-written shaders for all but the most complex applications.