bv - a BRDF browser

bv is an interactive browser for BRDFs. It includes several viewers (including goniometric and lit-sphere views), and many analytic and empirical BRDFs.

Included BRDFs

• Lambertian diffuse
• Torrance-Sparrow-Blinn-Cook-Beckmann
• Beard-Maxwell
• Oren-Nayar
• He-Torrance-Sillion-Greenberg
• Ward's Gaussians
• Parallel Cylinder (based on Poulin-Fournier)
• Lommel-Seeliger
• Hapke/Lommel-Seeliger Lunar Surface
• Minnaert
• Phong (including R dot V, N dot H, and Lewis's physically correct variants)
• Schlick
• Lafortune's Generalized Cosine Lobes
• Strauss
• Sum or difference of two BRDFs

Color still isn't supported. (Sorry!)

History

Changes since version 1.1p:

• Minor bug fixes.

Changes since version 1.0p:

• Added the option to draw polygons instead of using glDrawPixels - this is much faster on certain SGI boxen
• Removed dependence on gcc/g++ so code now compiles with IRIX's bundled cc/CC
• Added support for IRIX 5.3
• Minor under-the-hood changes

bv was originally written for CS348C, Winter 1997 by Szymon Rusinkiewicz. Since then, it has been extended mostly for private use. The first public release was made in September, 1997.

Screenshot

Download

• mips-sgi-irix5.3 (Old -32 ABI - should work on any SGI with IRIX 5.3 and above)
• i486-pc-linux-gnu (Requires glibc2) (Still version 1.1p)

Source is available here. To compile, you will need:

• GNU make
• C and C++ compilers (gcc/g++ 2.7.2 are known to work, as are SGI cc/CC)
• OpenGL (Mesa also works)
• GLUT
• Xforms 0.88 (0.86 should also work)

Please let me know if you compile bv on any other platforms.

Note: all use of either the source or binary versions is subject to the following terms:

Copyright © 1997-1998 The Board of Trustees of The Leland Stanford Junior University. All Rights Reserved.

Permission to use this software for educational and research purposes is hereby granted without fee. All other rights, including the rights to distribute, modify, or sell the software, are explicitly reserved by the author. Please contact the author if you wish to make any modifications or additions to the software.

This software is provided "as is" and without warranty of any kind, express, implied or otherwise, including without limitation, any warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Miscellaneous Links

• My BRDF research page
• Paul Heckbert's brdfview - another (independently written) BRDF viewer