“Physically Based” always seemed to be a grammatical error to me.
“Physically” is an adverb, which should modify an adjective or verb. So parsing the phrase, “physically based” implies that “based” is used as an adjective or verb, which would imply that “physically based rendering” is a special form of “based rendering”, which makes no sense.
“What kind of rendering is it? Based rendering. What kind of Based rendering? Well, Physically Based, of course.”
It should probably instead be “physics based rendering”, right?
Insider fact on why this makes sense. The intention here is not to make "physics based" because we are approximating a lot of things. The idea of having it named "physically based" is because it is as close it can get to reality but not the reality! So we will always be aware that we are just running a simulation not the real thing. The authors also make this claim in the introduction section. [0]
“Physically” is an adverb, which should modify an adjective or verb. So parsing the phrase, “physically based” implies that “based” is used as an adjective or verb, which would imply that “physically based rendering” is a special form of “based rendering”, which makes no sense.
“What kind of rendering is it? Based rendering. What kind of Based rendering? Well, Physically Based, of course.”
It should probably instead be “physics based rendering”, right?
Edit: english.stackexchange seems to agree, although it’s closed as offtopic: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/165416/is-physic...