Real-time Image-based Lighting of Glints

Kneiphof, Tom; Klein, Reinhard

Real-time Image-based Lighting of Glints

dc.contributor.author	Kneiphof, Tom	en_US
dc.contributor.author	Klein, Reinhard	en_US
dc.contributor.editor	Wang, Beibei	en_US
dc.contributor.editor	Wilkie, Alexander	en_US
dc.date.accessioned	2025-06-20T07:54:53Z
dc.date.available	2025-06-20T07:54:53Z
dc.date.issued	2025
dc.description.abstract	Image-based lighting is a widely used technique to reproduce shading under real-world lighting conditions, especially in realtime rendering applications. A particularly challenging scenario involves materials exhibiting a sparkling or glittering appearance, caused by discrete microfacets scattered across their surface. In this paper, we propose an efficient approximation for image-based lighting of glints, enabling fully dynamic material properties and environment maps. Our novel approach is grounded in real-time glint rendering under area light illumination and employs standard environment map filtering techniques. Crucially, our environment map filtering process is sufficiently fast to be executed on a per-frame basis. Our method assumes that the environment map is partitioned into few homogeneous regions of constant radiance. By filtering the corresponding indicator functions with the normal distribution function, we obtain the probabilities for individual microfacets to reflect light from each region. During shading, these probabilities are utilized to hierarchically sample a multinomial distribution, facilitated by our novel dual-gated Gaussian approximation of binomial distributions. We validate that our real-time approximation is close to ground-truth renderings for a range of material properties and lighting conditions, and demonstrate robust and stable performance, with little overhead over rendering glints from a single directional light. Compared to rendering smooth materials without glints, our approach requires twice as much memory to store the prefiltered environment map.	en_US
dc.description.number	4
dc.description.sectionheaders	Real-Time Rendering
dc.description.seriesinformation	Computer Graphics Forum
dc.description.volume	44
dc.identifier.doi	10.1111/cgf.70175
dc.identifier.issn	1467-8659
dc.identifier.pages	15 pages
dc.identifier.uri	https://doi.org/10.1111/cgf.70175
dc.identifier.uri	https://diglib.eg.org/handle/10.1111/cgf70175
dc.publisher	The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.	en_US
dc.rights	Attribution 4.0 International License
dc.rights.uri	https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
dc.subject	CCS Concepts: Computing methodologies → Rendering; Reflectance modeling
dc.subject	Computing methodologies → Rendering
dc.subject	Reflectance modeling
dc.title	Real-time Image-based Lighting of Glints	en_US