Realtime Rendering Glossy to Glossy Reflections in Screen Space

Abstract

Glossy to glossy reflections are lights bounced between glossy surfaces. Such directional light transports are important for humans to perceive glossy materials, but difficult to simulate. This paper proposes a new method for rendering screen-space glossy to glossy reflections in realtime. We use spherical von Mises-Fisher vMF distributions to model glossy BRDFs at surfaces, and employ screen space directional occlusion SSDO rendering framework to trace indirect light transports bounced in the screen space. As our main contributions, we derive a new parameterization of vMF distribution so as to convert the non-linear fit of multiple vMF distributions into a linear sum in the new space. Then, we present a new linear filtering technique to build MIP-maps on glossy BRDFs, which allows us to create filtered radiance transfer functions at runtime, and efficiently estimate indirect glossy to glossy reflections. We demonstrate our method in a realtime application for rendering scenes with dynamic glossy objects. Compared with screen space directional occlusion, our approach only requires one extra texture and has a negligible overhead, 3% ~ 6% loss at frame rate, but enables glossy to glossy reflections.