Real-Time Geometric Glint Anti-Aliasing with Normal Map Filtering

Abstract

Real-time geometric specular anti-aliasing is required when using a low number of pixel samples and high-frequency specular lobes. Several methods have been proposed for mono-lobe bidirectional reflection distribution functions (BRDFs), but none for multi-lobe BRDFs, e.g., a glinty BRDF. We present the first method for real-time geometric glint anti-aliasing (GGAA). It eliminates most of the inconsistent appearing and disappearing of glints on surfaces with significant curvatures during animations. The technique uses the glinty BRDF of Chermain et al. [2020] and leverages hardware GPU-filtering of textures to filter slope distributions on the fly. We also improve this glinty BRDF by adding a correlation factor of slope. This BRDF parameter allows convergence to normal distribution functions that are not aligned on the surface's axes. Above all, this parameter makes glint rendering compatible with normal map filtering using LEAN mapping. Using GGAA increases the rendering time from 0.6 % to 4.2 % and it requires 1/3 more memory due to MIP mapping of tabulated slope distributions. The results are compared with references using a thousand samples per pixel.