Example-Based Microstructure Rendering with Constant Storage

Rendering glinty details from specular microstructure enhances the level of realism, but previous methods require heavy storage for the high-resolution height field or normal map and associated acceleration structures. In this paper, we aim at dynamically generating theoretically infinite microstructure, preventing obvious tiling artifacts, while achieving constant storage cost. Unlike traditional texture synthesis, our method supports arbitrary point and range queries, and is essentially generating the microstructure implicitly. Our method fits the widely used microfacet rendering framework with multiple importance sampling (MIS), replacing the commonly used microfacet normal distribution functions (NDFs) like GGX by a detailed local solution, with a small amount of runtime performance overhead. Paper (uncompressed, 43MB)
Video (136MB)