Blender Git Commit Log

Cycles: improve SSS Fresnel and retro-reflection in Principled BSDF

For details see the "Extending the Disney BRDF to a BSDF with Integrated
Subsurface Scattering" paper.

We split the diffuse BSDF into a lambertian and retro-reflection component.
The retro-reflection component is always handled as a BSDF, while the
lambertian component can be replaced by a BSSRDF.

For the BSSRDF case, we compute Fresnel separately at the entry and exit
points, which may have different normals. As the scattering radius decreases
this converges to the BSDF case.

A downside is that this increases noise for subsurface scattering in the
Principled BSDF, due to some samples going to the retro-reflection component.
However the previous logic (also in 2.93) was simple wrong, using a
non-sensical view direction vector at the exit point. We use an importance
sampling weight estimate for the retro-reflection to try to better balance
samples between the BSDF and BSSRDF.

Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D12801