Fast Diet "LO-SL" BRDF

After a long absent from my blogging, I'm finally back for some graphics goodies! As you may notice in the screenshot, I'm doing some BRDF or Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function magic. This past few days I was in deep photometry(optics) waters... dived and almost drowned. Anyway back to the topic at hand, BRDF in a nut shell is a formula or process in understanding how light reacts differently to different material. Example is when a light beam hits a matte material such as leather, the light is diffused along the material, thus spreading the light into the surface. Compare this when you do that to a mirror, the light instead of being diffused it reflects the beam and you see a contrasting(not spread) lit in the mirror. Another example is when a white light hits a prism, it splits into visible chroma colors.

Now the tricky part here is implementing this to games. Considering so much computations are involved in BRDF, its likely impossible with our current technology to perform a full BRDF applied on a real-time game. Several games and game engines came up with tricks and simplifications to try to mimic this function.

So put it simply, this is my humble attempt in implementing BRDF into a real-time application. As of now, this screenshot is fresh from the oven. And right now, I cannot disclosed how I implemented this. (Need some permission from the big 'squirrel' guy, lolz). Anyway, I hope to follow up on this when the coast is clear.