How are Physically Based Rendering Methods Researched? Recently a question that came to my mind was that How are Physically Based Rendering Techniques researched and developed? Do people just use current equations by physicists or do they create their own? Hopefully I've explained my question correctly.
I guess physicists, and before that term was used philosophers, have always been thinking about the nature of light, color and shadow. Knowledge about those matters is not purely rooted in people trying to create the ultimate rendering technique for CGI. In Wikipedia there are whole categories that show formulas and models that were invented to describe attributes of lighting. What programmers do is to try to combine and fit those models into a probably more simple model that can be implemented in some way.
With the increase in computing power, those models align more and more with the models that were created by physicists to describe lighting in the real world.
If you look into recent (by that i mean 5 years back) papers that describe physically based rendering techniques, you will see that almost all of them base their algorithms on formulas and units of measure that are somehow used to describe real lighting.