Due to imperfections or microdetails, many manmade objects appear glittery. From car paints, to make ups and brushed metals, we are accustomed to such appearances that come from tiny mirrors at the surface of objects (known as glints). However, simulating those surfaces in video games is still an open challenge.
At the conference in High Performance Graphics this summer, researchers from Intel Graphics Research Organization (GRO) will present a new method to simulate the appearance of glittery surface that runs in real-time with stable performances on desktop PCs.
To achieve this, they introduce a statistical law for the average number of glints that is visible by a pixel of a virtual camera. While this could result in unstable performances as this law depends on the surface area visible by the pixel, they also introduce a new data structure that bound this computation.
To know more about this technique, please attend our talk at HPG in Delf (Netherlands) in June or follow the link below to read the paper.