Microfacet rendering with diffraction compensation

Abstract

The traditional microfacet rendering models usually only consider the straight propagation of light and do not take into account the diffraction effect when calculating the radiance of outgoing light. However, ignoring the energy generated by diffraction can lead to darker rendering results when the object's surface has many small details. To address this issue, we introduce a diffraction energy term in the microfacet model to compensate for the energy loss caused by diffraction. Starting from the Fresnel-Kirchhoff diffraction theorem, we combine it with the Cook-Torrance model. By incorporating the computed diffraction radiance into the outgoing radiance of the microfacet, we obtain a diffraction-compensated BRDF (Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function) model. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method has a significant effect in compensating for outgoing light and produces more realistic rendering results.