Real‐Time Glints Rendering With Pre‐Filtered Discrete Stochastic Microfacets

Abstract

Many real‐life materials have a sparkling appearance. Examples include metallic paints, sparkling fabrics and 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 four‐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 sample count per pixel or pre‐filtering. Pre‐filtering is incompatible with the existing sparkle models, due to the discrete multi‐scale representation. In this paper, we present a GPU‐friendly, pre‐filtered 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.