Author:

Keywords:

Science & Technology, Technology, Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Science, PRECOMPUTED RADIANCE TRANSFER, 0801 Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing, Software Engineering, 4607 Graphics, augmented reality and games

Abstract:

This paper proposes a method for efficiently rendering indirect highlights. Indirect highlights are caused by the primary light source reflecting off two or more glossy surfaces. Accurately simulating such highlights is important to convey the realistic appearance of materials such as chrome and shiny metal. Our method models the glossy BRDF at a surface point as a directional distribution, using a spherical von Mises-Fisher (vMF) distribution. As our main contribution, we merge multiple vMFs into a combined multimodal distribution. This effectively creates a filtered radiance response function, allowing us to efficiently estimate indirect highlights. We demonstrate our method in a near-interactive application for rendering scenes with highly glossy objects. Our results produce realistic reflections under both local and environment lighting.