A wave-optics BSDF for correlated scatterers

1Dartmouth College

In Computer Graphics Forum (Proceedings of EGSR), 2025

Teaser
The corona effect (left) occurs when the diffraction patterns from disordered scatterers interfere with one another. In the real world, this occurs when certain fabrics or condensation on glass (middle-left) are held against bright light sources (middle-right). We propose a novel BSDF that accurately reproduces (right) this wave phenomenon using ray tracing.
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Abstract

We present a wave-optics-based BSDF for simulating the corona effect observed when viewing strong light sources through materials such as certain fabrics or glass surfaces with condensation. These visual phenomena arise from the interference of diffraction patterns caused by correlated, disordered arrangements of droplets or pores. Our method leverages the pair correlation function (PCF) to decouple the spatial relationships between scatterers from the diffraction behavior of individual scatterers. This two-level decomposition allows us to derive a physically based BSDF that provides explicit control over both scatterer shape and spatial correlation. We also introduce a practical importance sampling strategy for integrating our BSDF within a Monte Carlo renderer. Our simulation results and real-world comparisons demonstrate that the method can reliably reproduce the characteristics of the corona effects in various real-world diffractive materials.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the anonymous reviews for their suggestions on improving the paper. We also thank past and present members of the Dartmouth Visual Computing Lab, Kehan Xu for help during the deadline, Ziyuan Qu and Kedari Chowtoori for assisting with the powder experiment photos, Zihong Zhou for providing advice throughout the project, and Geoffrey Luke for agreeing to serve on the first author's MS thesis committee. This work was partially supported by NSF grant numbers 1844538 and 2403122.

Cite

Ruomai Yang, Juhyeon Kim, Adithya Pediredla, Wojciech Jarosz. A wave-optics BSDF for correlated scatterers. Computer Graphics Forum (Proceedings of EGSR), 44(4), July 2025. 
@article{yang25wave,
    author    = {Yang, Ruomai and Kim, Juhyeon and Pediredla, Adithya and Jarosz, Wojciech},
    title     = {A wave-optics {BSDF} for correlated scatterers},
    journal   = {Computer Graphics Forum (Proceedings of EGSR)},
    month     = jul,
    volume    = {44},
    number    = {4},
    year      = {2025},
    publisher = {The Eurographics Association and John Wiley \\& Sons Ltd.},
    issn      = {1467-8659},
    doi       = {10.1111/cgf.70167}
}
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