Real-Time Rendering of Glinty Appearances using Distributed Binomial Laws on Anisotropic Grids

In this work, we render in real-time glittery materials caused by discrete flakes on the surface. To achieve this, one has to count the number of flakes reflecting the light towards the camera within every texel covered by a given pixel footprint. To do so, we derive a counting method for arbitrary footprints that, unlike previous work, outputs the correct statistics. We combine this counting method with an anisotropic parameterization of the texture space that reduces the number of texels falling under a pixel footprint. This allows our method to run with both stable performance and 1.5X to 5X faster than the state-of-the-art.Comment: 9 page

Real-Time Glints Rendering with Prefiltered Discrete Stochastic Microfacets

International audienceMany real-life materials have a sparkling appearance. Examples include metallic paints, sparkling fabrics, snow. Simulating these sparkles is important for realistic rendering but expensive. As sparkles come from small shiny particles reflecting light into a specific direction, they are very challenging for illumination simulation. Existing approaches use a 4-dimensional hierarchy, searching for light-reflecting particles simultaneously in space and direction. The approach is accurate, but extremely expensive. A separable model is much faster, but still not suitable for real-time applications. The performance problem is even worse when illumination comes from environment maps, as they require either a large samplecount per pixel or prefiltering. Prefiltering is incompatible with the existing sparkle models, due to the discrete multi-scale representation. In this paper, we present a GPU friendly, prefiltered model for real-time simulation of sparkles and glints. Our method simulates glints under both environment maps and point light sources in real-time, with an added cost of just 10 ms per frame with full high definition resolution. Editing material properties requires extra computations but is still real-time, with an added cost of 10 ms per frame

Slope-space integrals for specular next event estimation

International audienceMonte Carlo light transport simulations often lack robustness in scenes containing specular or near-specular materials. Widely used uni- and bidirectional sampling strategies tend to find light paths involving such materials with insufficient probability, producing unusable images that are contaminated by significant variance.This article addresses the problem of sampling a light path connecting two given scene points via a single specular reflection or refraction, extending the range of scenes that can be robustly handled by unbiased path sampling techniques. Our technique enables efficient rendering of challenging transport phenomena caused by such paths, such as underwater caustics or caustics involving glossy metallic objects.We derive analytic expressions that predict the total radiance due to a single reflective or refractive triangle with a microfacet BSDF and we show that this reduces to the well known Lambert boundary integral for irradiance. We subsequently show how this can be leveraged to efficiently sample connections on meshes comprised of vast numbers of triangles.Our derivation builds on the theory of off-center microfacets and involves integrals in the space of surface slopes.Our approach straightforwardly applies to the related problem of rendering glints with high-resolution normal maps describing specular microstructure. Our formulation alleviates problems raised by singularities in filtering integrals and enables a generalization of previous work to perfectly specular materials. We also extend previous work to the case of GGX distributions and introduce new techniques to improve accuracy and performance