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Real-time rendering of glossy materials with regular sampling

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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.

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Acknowledgments

The competence center VRVis is funded by BMVIT, BMWFJ, and City of Vienna (ZIT) within the scope of COMET - Competence Centers for Excellent Technologies. The program COMET is managed by FFG.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. VRVis Research Center, Donau-City-Strasse 1, 1220 , Wien, Austria

    Christian Luksch, Robert F. Tobler, Thomas Mühlbacher & Michael Schwärzler

  2. Institute of Computer Graphics and Algorithms, Vienna University of Technology, Favoritenstrasse 9-11 / E186, 1040 , Wien, Austria

    Michael Wimmer

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  1. Christian Luksch
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  2. Robert F. Tobler
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  3. Thomas Mühlbacher
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  4. Michael Schwärzler
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Correspondence to Christian Luksch.

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Luksch, C., Tobler, R.F., Mühlbacher, T. et al. Real-time rendering of glossy materials with regular sampling. Vis Comput 30, 717–727 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-014-0958-x

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