The white furnace test is one of my favourite rendering debug tools. But before it was so, it was rather mysterious and abstract to me. Why would a publication proudly show what seemed like empty renders? What does it mean, and why would they care?
Revisiting Physically Based Shading at Imageworks, presented at the SIGGRAPH 2017 course: Physically Based Shading in Theory and Practice.
The idea is the following: if you have a 100% reflective object that is lit by a uniform environment, it becomes indistinguishable from the environment. It doesn’t matter if the object is matte or mirror like, or anything in between: it just “disappears”.
Accepting this idea took me a while, but there is a real-life situation in which you can experience this effect. Fresh snow can have an albedo as high as 90% to 98%, i.e. nearly perfect white. Associated with overcast weather or fog, it can sometimes appear featureless and become completely indistinguishable from the sky, to the point you’re left with skiing by feel because you can’t even tell the slope two steps in front of you. Everything
