Fast Global Illumination with Discrete Stochastic Microfacets Using a Filterable Model

Abstract

Many real-life materials have a sparkling appearance, whether by design or by nature. Examples include metallic paints, sparkling varnish but also snow. These sparkles correspond to small, isolated, shiny particles reflecting light in a specific direction, on the surface or embedded inside the material. The particles responsible for these sparkles are usually small and discontinuous. These characteristics make it diffcult to integrate them effciently in a standard rendering pipeline, especially for indirect illumination. Existing approaches use a 4-dimensional hierarchy, searching for light-reflecting particles simultaneously in space and direction. The approach is accurate, but still expensive. In this paper, we show that this 4-dimensional search can be approximated using separate 2-dimensional steps. This approximation allows fast integration of glint contributions for large footprints, reducing the extra cost associated with glints be an order of magnitude.