A practitioners' assessment of light reflection models.

In Proceedings of Pacific Graphics 97, October 1997.

We discuss the theory and practical issues behind creating reflection models to show the difficulty of the problem. We survey the current approaches towards reflection models for computer graphics to show that even for simple surfaces, the important issues are far from settled. We briefly discuss future directions for research. Finally, we present a case study of a particular type of light reflection that captures some important aspects of appearance for a limited class of materials with subsurface reflection.

This paper is available as a compressed Postscript file SHSL97.ps.gz (193K).