Rendering Glinty Granular Materials in Virtual Reality

Abstract

Highly realistic rendering of grainy materials like sand is achievable given significant computational resources and a lot of time for the rendering of each frame. In an interactive virtual environment, we cannot afford such luxuries. Frame rates must be kept high and precomputation should be kept at a level that does not limit the interactivity. We propose a system for editable procedural generation of sand appearance and demonstrate interactive virtual reality (VR) inspection of the generated sand under different skies. Our method enables stable real-time rendering of the glinty appearance that granular materials exhibit as a function of observer distance. This enables simultaneous nearby and distant inspection of the material.