I always love seeing PBR here. I work in atmospheric science, in particular modelling of radiation in the atmosphere, and the equations that we use are identical to that of PBR. The main difference is that in the atmosphere you are more concerned with processes along the ray, e.g. Rayleigh scattering, clouds, or absorption/emission from trace species in the atmosphere, while in rendering it is all about surface effects.
> while in rendering it is all about surface effects.
I would have agreed with you back in the 80's.
But since then, taking care of atmospheric / volumetric effects in rendering is absolutely essential to rendering realistic scenes, especially in movie SFX.
I'm not going to claim that SFX folks care about being physically accurate when doing volume rendering, but they do care a very great deal about clouds fog, subsurface rendering, light rays through mist, etc ...
