Chermain, XavierSauvage, BasileDischler, Jean-MichelDachsbacher, CarstenEisemann, Elmar and Jacobson, Alec and Zhang, Fang-Lue2020-10-292020-10-2920201467-8659https://doi.org/10.1111/cgf.14141https://diglib.eg.org:443/handle/10.1111/cgf14141Physically based rendering of glittering surfaces is a challenging problem in computer graphics. Several methods have proposed off-line solutions, but none is dedicated to high-performance graphics. In this work, we propose a novel physically based BRDF for real-time rendering of glints. Our model can reproduce the appearance of sparkling materials (rocks, rough plastics, glitter fabrics, etc.). Compared to the previous real-time method [ZK16], which is not physically based, our BRDF uses normalized NDFs and converges to the standard microfacet BRDF [CT82] for a large number of microfacets. Our method procedurally computes NDFs with hundreds of sharp lobes. It relies on a dictionary of 1D marginal distributions: at each location two of them are randomly picked and multiplied (to obtain a NDF), rotated (to increase the variety), and scaled (to control standard deviation/roughness). The dictionary is multiscale, does not depend on roughness, and has a low memory footprint (less than 1 MiB)Computing methodologiesReflectance modeling10.1111/cgf.14141243-253