brdf_blinn_phong — SPECULAR reflectance op

Data kinds: normalmapimage2d

Call: import specularity; specularity.brdf_blinn_phong(normals, light=(0.0, 0.0, 1.0), view=(0.0, 0.0, 1.0), shininess=32.0) (or opsspecular.get("brdf_blinn_phong"))

Usage

Blinn's half-vector specular lobe. → (H, W) in [0, 1].

`max(n.h, 0) ** shininess where h` is the unit bisector of the light

and view directions (Blinn 1977), zeroed wherever the surface faces away

from either. Exactly 1 where the normal *is* the half-vector — the mirror

condition — and it falls monotonically from there.

Unnormalised on purpose. The classical Blinn-Phong lobe does not

integrate to a fixed value; its peak is 1 and its energy grows as the

exponent shrinks. It is a shading model, useful because its peak location is

exact and because it is a *different* lobe shape from

:func:brdf_microfacet — a separation routine that only works on one of the

two is fitting the lobe, not the model. For an energy-consistent lobe use

:func:brdf_microfacet.

Reciprocal in light and view to machine precision (measured exactly 0.0

maximum difference in `tests/test_specularity.py`), because the

half-vector is symmetric and the visibility test covers both sides.

Raises `ValueError: *normals* is not an (H, W, 3)` field or

contains a zero-length normal; *light* / *view* are not non-zero 3-vectors;

*shininess* is negative, non-finite, a string or a bool; light and view are

exactly opposite.

Detailed usage guide

specular_photometric family guide

References (sample data, literature)

• Sample-data catalog (download URLs / licences) — 2-D uses skimage.data (BSD/public domain) plus synthetic images; 3-D lists download URLs for real data sources (Stanford, PDS, …).

• Operator provenance and references — the sources of the research/methods this op family came from.

• The canonical algorithm (author, year) and its uses are named in the family usage guide above.

Runnable examples (verified samples that actually call this op)

specular_photometricpy -3.11 examples/specular_photometric.py

Ops the type connects to (they accept image2d as input)

polarization_render

Same category (reflectance)

brdf_microfacet · dichromatic_render


*Provenance: specularity.py — SPECULAR operator registry. This per-op note is generated by tools/opdocs.py md (do not hand-edit).*

© 2026 Kazufumi Furuse — Fullseye operator documentation. Licensed under Apache-2.0.