MERL BRDF Database
Measured reflectance of 100 real materials, each stored as a densely sampled bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF). The measurements were taken at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories for the 2003 paper A data-driven reflectance model, and have served since then as a reference dataset for reflectance fitting, rendering, and appearance capture.
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MERL provides this data for research and academic use only. Each material is one binary file holding a 90 × 90 × 180 grid over the half-angle parameterization (theta-h, theta-d, phi-d), three channels in double precision, about 33 MB per material. Sample code to read the files is included with the database. Note that the parameterization of theta-h differs from the one described in the paper.
All 100 materials (one 33 MB file each), the reader code and the notice, hosted at MIT CSAIL. Browse and download · Dropbox mirror
Free for research or academic use. Please read the MERL copyright and permission to use notice before downloading. MERL notice
If you use the measurements
Please reference the paper the data was collected for:
Wojciech Matusik, Hanspeter Pfister, Matt Brand, and Leonard McMillan. A Data-Driven Reflectance Model. ACM Transactions on Graphics 22(3), 759-769, 2003.
@article{matusik2003adatadrive,
author = {Matusik, W. and Pfister, H. and Brand, M. and McMillan, L.},
title = {{A data-driven reflectance model}},
journal = {ACM Trans. Graph.},
volume = {22},
number = {3},
pages = {759--769},
year = {2003},
doi = {10.1145/882262.882343},
}