Walt Disney Animation Studios (WDAS) is making its breakthrough BRDF Explorer available to the industry through a new open source site (github.com/wdas/brdf), it was announced August 7, 2012, at SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles by Brent Burley, the project’s principal engineer from WDAS software group. Burley, who gave a presentation at Tuesday’s conference on Disney’s proprietary approach to creating physically-based BRDFs (Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function, the mathematical description of how a surface reflects light), created the BRDF Explorer with his Disney colleagues Greg Nichols and Jared Johnson. He is a key player on the software team managed by Dan Candela, director of technology for WDAS.
