Surface Curvature Effects on Reflectance from Translucent Materials

TL;DR

This paper investigates how surface curvature influences the diffuse reflectance of translucent materials, challenging the common assumption that planar diffusion models apply universally to arbitrarily shaped objects.

Contribution

It introduces the first analysis of curvature effects on diffuse reflectance, highlighting limitations of existing planar diffusion models for complex shapes.

Findings

Curvature significantly affects reflectance in translucent materials.

Planar diffusion models may not accurately predict reflectance on curved surfaces.

Initial results suggest the need for curvature-aware models in rendering translucent objects.

Abstract

Most of the physically based techniques for rendering translucent objects use the diffusion theory of light scattering in turbid media. The widely used dipole diffusion model (Jensen et al. 2001) applies the diffusion-theory formula derived for a planar interface to objects of arbitrary shapes. This paper presents first results of our investigation of how surface curvature affects the diffuse reflectance from translucent materials.