Shader / Material Reference

I've decided I should make this a permanent and publicly searchable page on my blog (I keep losing links), so here's a place where I'll compile shader and material reference (code, scans, samples, best practice documents, reference images, etc) for myself and for other people working on such things. This will likely be primarily focussed on physically based rendering topics, but there may be other stuff here as well.



John Carmack's 2013 QuakeCon talk, Physics of Light and Rendering. This is the single best introduction to the history and current practices of shading I've ever seen... probably because it's being delivered by the guy who invented half of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6UKhR0T6cs

Siggraph 2014, Physics and Math of Shading. Good intermediate level explanation of PBR and shading theory in general.
http://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2014-shading-course/hoffman/s2014_pbs_physics_math_slides.pdf

Physically Based Rendering Encyclopedia. Compiled by 3py0n over on Polycount, this is a collection of a whole bunch of introductory documents related to PBR.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Fb9_KgCo0noxROKN4iT8ntTbx913e-t4Wc2nMRWPzNk/edit

Allegorithmic's Theory of BPR Document. A lot of this data is in the PBR Encyclopedia, but this is well laid out and looks nice, and so might be a better reading experience (or just a good second opinion).
http://www.allegorithmic.com/pbr-guide


Disney BRDF Explorer. This is a great tool for comparing various shading models to ground truth scans of materials (though reading the output can take a bit of getting used to...
http://www.disneyanimation.com/technology/brdf.html




BRDF Lab serves a similar function, but I haven't used it yet. It's open source, though, so that's cool.
http://brdflab.sourceforge.net/

Material Test Objects and Demo Models. Here's where you can get all of those models and scenes that you always see rendering techniques demonstrated on!
http://graphics.cs.williams.edu/data/meshes.xml