[dmeyer]

In the quest to create the most realistic shaders possible, has anyone established a process to measure the visual components of real-world objects such as the ones in Maxwells material editor?

[Brett Morgan]

Do you mean things like:

Bidirectional Scattering Distribution Function
Reflectance
Transmittance
Attenuation
Index Of Refraction
Fresnel Effect
Roughness
Anisotropy
Bump
Diffuse
Specular

I think of maxwell as an opportunity to reverse engineer surface properties.

Brett

[ishook]

In other words, no.

Not unless you have access to a science or materials lab. You can get some values off the net of "tested real world values" for things though.

A lot of it is guess and check and interpolation of different materials to get what you want.