Real-Time Rendering of Glossy Materials with Regular Sampling

Abstract

Rendering view-dependent, glossy surfaces to increase the realism in real-time applications is a computationally complex task, that can only be performed by applying some approximations-especially when immediate changes in the scene in terms of material settings and object placement are a necessity. The use of environment maps is a common approach to this problem, but implicates performance problems due to costly pre-filtering steps or expensive sampling. We, therefore, introduce a regular sampling scheme for environment maps that relies on an efficient MIP-map-based filtering step, and minimizes the number of necessary samples for creating a convincing real-time rendering of glossy BRDF materials.