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Lecture 13: Global Illumination and Path Tracing (13)
SKYSCRAPERS1999

Is diffuse a name of material?

GKohavi

@SKYSCRAPERS1999

I think it's a property that describes how shiny something is. The more diffuse, the less shiny.

VioIchigo

@SKYSCRAPERS1999 I'm not sure, but I don't think in MAYA it is a kind of material... in MAYA, one of the widely used 3D modeling software, diffuse is a material attribute, and here is a brief introduction: Gives the material the ability to reflect light in all directions. The Diffuse value acts like a scaling factor applied to the Color setting—the higher the Diffuse value, the closer the actual surface color is to the Color setting. The valid range is 0 to infinity. The slider range is 0 (no light is reflected in all directions) to 1, but you can type in a higher value. The default color value is 0.8. from: https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2016/ENU/Maya/files/GUID-AEA3C15F-1C08-44CF-9CBF-C9E90CC0F09E-htm.html

mishywangiepie

I think in this context the illustration shows a material that is artificially only given diffuse reflection attributes, not necessarily a particular material itself

sunsarah

In general, according to (http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/reflection/specular/) materials that are diffuse are ones that aren't perfectly smooth (e.g. have ridges/bumps that cause the light to reflect off in multiple directions (i.e. diffuse manner)), so this slide could be representing how light bounces off any such material.

yzyz

Diffuse materials scatter light equally in all directions. Note how this contrasts with the mirror material on the previous slide, where incoming light from a particular direction is reflected in exactly one outgoing direction.

xiaoyankang

I agree with the above explanation. I think diffuse is a term to describe lights. Lights are diffused as being reflected in all directions from the surface of a material, so the surface appears less shiny and has a relatively smooth transition from bright parts to shadowy parts.

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