Publications

Evaluating and Sampling Glinty NDFs in Constant Time

SIGGRAPH Asia 2025

Publication date: December 15, 2025

Pauli Kemppinen, Loïs Paulin, Théo Thonat, Jean Thiery, Jaakko Lehtinen, Tamy Boubekeur

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Geometric features between the micro and macro scales produce an expressive family of visual effects grouped under the term 'glints'. Efficiently rendering these effects amounts to finding the highlights caused by the geometry under each pixel. To allow for fast rendering, we represent our faceted geometry as a 4D point process on an implicit multiscale grid, designed to efficiently find the facets most likely to cause a highlight. The facets' normals are generated to match a given micro-facet normal distribution such as Trowbridge-Reitz (GGX) or Beckmann, to which our model converges under increasing surface area. Our method is simple to implement, memory-and-precomputation-free, allows for importance sampling and covers a wide range of different appearances such as anisotropic as well as individually colored particles. We provide a base implementation as a standalone fragment shader.

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Research Area:  Adobe Research iconGraphics (2D & 3D)