Is accurate occlusion of glossy reflections necessary?

Abstract

Much research in recent times has been conducted towards real-time rendering of accurate glossy reflections under direct, natural illumination including correct occlusions. The view dependent nature of these reflections will always cause this computation to be expensive unless heavily approximated. There also remains a question as to whether humans are even capable of noticing the difference in accuracy or whether our perception of the realism of the scene remains unchanged and thus the extra effort expended in rendering accurate reflections is effectively wasted. We conduct a user study to analyse any decline in perceived realism of glossy scenes rendered with a variety of specular occlusion approximations under a multitude of BRDFs, lighting environments and camera orientations. We demonstrate that although no one approximation is always suitable, it is rare to have a scene whose computational complexity cannot be decreased to some degree.