So this is a BRDF demo or something.

This program is based on Jan Kautz's research code. The win32

implementation (by Jonathan Blow) was made to show that BRDF

rendering can be done very quickly on modern game PCs. The

program contains some OpenGL initialization code that was written

by Jeff Lander. Thanks Jeff!

To run this demo you should have recent and stable OpenGL drivers

for your 3D graphics card. If you want to update your drivers,

go to glsetup.com. They'll take care of you.

I recommend running this demo on a GeForce card or an ATI Radeon.

The Radeon seems to have slightly higher color quality, but the

GeForce spanks it in terms of rendering speed. The demo will

run on an ATI Rage 128 but there it's just too slow to be any

fun at high resolutions. You can run it on a Voodoo 5 but

the image quality is a tad lacking (you'll see some banding).

It will run on lots of other graphics cards (TNT, Voodoo 3,

Bitchin'fast!3D^2000) but don't expect good results as we really

do need a card with a lot of color accuracy for this demo to

have a point.

There are some sucky things about this demo because it was just

kind of slapped together. Blame all that on me (Jonathan Blow).

The most obviously suckful are the fact that you can't freely

rotate or control the object and the light source. But hey,

this is a rendering demo, not a user interface demo.

The demo also spends a long time starting up because it does a

lot of unnecessary and slow things to load texture maps and create

3D models. These have nothing to do with the BRDF technique

itself; the BRDFs are represented by ordinary-sized texture maps

and will load just as fast as you could make any texture map load.

The demo will crash without warning if it can't find any of its

data files, so just run it from the directory where all those

files are, okay?

Mipmapping is currently disabled because with the glu implementation

I have, it looks like crap. It's all still in the code though,

so you can turn it on and see what it does. Look for the variable

"ALLOW_MIPMAPPING".

You can control the width and height of the rendering window

from the command line, like this:

brdf_demo.exe width=800 height=600

The default window dimensions are 1152x864 which might be a little

big for your taste. I don't know.

Comments, questions, etc can be sent to me. Have another sip of

thine mead; thank-you and have a nice day.

Jonathan Blow

jon@bolt-action.com