brdf_microfacet — SPECULAR reflectance op

• Data kinds: normalmap → image2d

• Call: import fullseye as fs; fs.ledger.brdf_microfacet(normals, light=(0.0, 0.0, 1.0), view=(0.0, 0.0, 1.0), roughness=0.3, f0=0.04) (to call the implementation directly, import specularity; specularity.brdf_microfacet(normals, light=(0.0, 0.0, 1.0), view=(0.0, 0.0, 1.0), roughness=0.3, f0=0.04); from the registry, opsspecular.get("brdf_microfacet"))

Usage

GGX / Trowbridge-Reitz microfacet specular BRDF. → (H, W), units 1/sr.

f_s = D * G * F / (4 (n.l) (n.v)) with

• D the Trowbridge-Reitz (1975) / GGX normal distribution, a^2 / (pi * ((n.h)^2 (a^2 - 1) + 1)^2) for a = roughness^2, which integrates to 1 against (n.h) dw over the hemisphere — measured by 20000-point midpoint quadrature in tests/test_specularity.py at relative errors 3.2e-07, 6.3e-08 and 4.0e-09 for roughness 0.2, 0.3 and 0.6, all of it quadrature error (the 200000-point rule gives 3.2e-09, 6.3e-10, 4.0e-11, exactly the 100x a midpoint rule predicts);

• G the separable Smith (1967) masking-shadowing term with the GGX lambda;

• F Schlick's (1994) Fresnel approximation, f0 + (1 - f0) (1 - v.h)^5. *f0* is the normal-incidence reflectance:

about 0.04 for common dielectrics, 0.5 to 1.0 for metals. When the exact

Fresnel curve matters, use match3d.fresnel_reflectance instead — this

is the approximation the microfacet literature specifies, and it is named

rather than hidden.

Exact ground truth it reproduces: at normal incidence with light, view and normal aligned, every geometric factor is 1 and the value collapses to f0 / (4 pi roughness^4) in closed form — reproduced bit for bit at roughness 0.3, 0.5 and 1.0 and to 3.3e-16 relative at roughness 0.1, which took rewriting the GGX denominator to avoid a cancellation (see the comment at the code; the textbook arrangement was off by 2.2e-13 relative at the peak). The lobe is reciprocal in light and view to machine precision (measured 1.7e-16), and its maximum sits at the half-vector.

roughness is the perceptual parameter, squared once to reach the GGX alpha — the convention that makes a linear slider feel linear. A perfectly smooth surface (roughness = 0) is a delta function, not a finite BRDF, so it is refused rather than returned as an infinity.

Raises ValueError: geometry problems as in brdf_blinn_phong; *roughness* outside (0, 1]; *f0* outside [0, 1].

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)

• poc_solder_fillet_aoi — py -3.11 examples/poc_solder_fillet_aoi.py

• specular_photometric — py -3.11 examples/specular_photometric.py

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

polarization_render

Same category (reflectance)

brdf_blinn_phong · 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.