Recent advances in glinty appearance rendering

Abstract

AbstractThe interaction between light and materials is key to physically-based realistic rendering. However, it is also complex to analyze, especially when the materials contain a large number of details and thus exhibit “glinty” visual effects. Recent methods of producing glinty appearance are expected to be important in next-generation computer graphics. We provide here a comprehensive survey on recent glinty appearance rendering. We start with a definition of glinty appearance based on microfacet theory, and then summarize research works in terms of representation and practical rendering. We have implemented typical methods using our unified platform and compare them in terms of visual effects, rendering speed, and memory consumption. Finally, we briefly discuss limitations and future research directions. We hope our analysis, implementations, and comparisons will provide insight for readers hoping to choose suitable methods for applications, or carry out research.