Interactive bi-scale editing of highly glossy materials

Abstract

We present a new technique for bi-scale material editing using Spherical Gaussians (SGs). To represent large-scale appearances, an effective BRDF that is the average reflectance of small-scale details is used. The effective BRDF is calculated from the integral of the product of the Bidirectional Visible Normal Distribution (BVNDF) and BRDFs of small-scale geometry. Our method represents the BVNDF with a sum of SGs, which can be calculated on-the-fly, enabling interactive editing of small-scale geometry. By representing small-scale BRDFs with a sum of SGs, effective BRDFs can be calculated analytically by convolving the SGs for BVNDF and BRDF. We propose a new SG representation based on convolution of two SGs, which allows real-time rendering of effective BRDFs under all-frequency environment lighting and real-time editing of small-scale BRDFs. In contrast to the previous method, our method does not require extensive precomputation time and large volume of precomputed data per single BRDF, which makes it possible to implement our method on a GPU, resulting in real-time rendering.