Scalable appearance filtering for complex lighting effects

Realistic rendering with materials that exhibit high-frequency spatial variation remains a challenge, as eliminating spatial and temporal aliasing requires prohibitively high sampling rates. Recent work has made the problem more tractable, however existing methods remain prohibitively expensive when using large environmental lights and/or (correctly filtered) global illumination. We present an appearance model with explicit high-frequency micro-normal variation, and a filtering approach that scales to multi-dimensional shading integrals. By combining a novel and compact half-vector histogram scheme with a directional basis expansion, we accurately compute the integral of filtered high-frequency reflectance over large lights with angularly varying emission. Our approach is scalable, rendering images indistinguishable from ground truth at over 10× the speed of the state-of-the-art and with only 15% the memory footprint. When filtering appearance with global illumination, we outperform the state-of-the-art by ~30×.