Xavier Chermain, Basile Sauvage, Jean-Michel Dischler and Carsten Dachsbacher

Pacific Graphic 2020, CGF issue, DOI: 10.1111/cgf.14141

Our 2020 Pacific Graphic, CGF Issue, paper

Abstract

Physically based rendering of glittering surfaces is a challenging problem in computer graphics. Several methods have proposed off-line solutions, but none is dedicated to high-performance graphics. In this work, we propose a novel physically based BRDF for real-time rendering of glints. Our model can reproduce the appearance of sparkling materials (rocks, rough plastics, glitter fabrics, etc.). Compared to the previous real-time method [Zirr and al. 2016], which is not physically based, our BRDF uses normalized NDFs and converges to the standard microfacet BRDF [Cook and Torrance 1982] for a large number of microfacets. Our method procedurally computes NDFs with hundreds of sharp lobes. It relies on a dictionary of 1D marginal distributions: at each location two of them are randomly picked and multiplied (to obtain a NDF), rotated (to increase the variety), and scaled (to control standard deviation/roughness). The dictionary is multiscale, does not depend on roughness, and has a low memory footprint (less than 1 MiB).

Post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version

Published version

Video

Video Two Minute Papers

Thanks to Károly Zsolnai-Fehér for the video.

WebGL

Thanks to Sylvain Thery for the WebGL implementation.

OpenGL

Shadertoy

pbrt-v3

Youtube presentation

Slides

Bibtex