Real-time Image-based Lighting of Glints (Demo)

Overview

We have introduced an extension to real-time image-based lighting at EGSR 2025. This repository contains a Unity3D project that demonstrates real-time rendering of glints under image-based lighting [KK25], area lights [KK24] and directional lights [DB23] (modified based on area-light theory). We provide a modified version of Unity3D's High Definition Render Pipeline containing our implementation including parts of previous work.

• [KK25] Tom Kneiphof and Reinhard Klein. "Real-time Image-based Lighting of Glints." Computer Graphics Forum. Vol. 44. No. 4. 2025.
• [KK24] Tom Kneiphof and Reinhard Klein. "Real-Time Rendering of Glints in the Presence of Area Lights." Pacific Graphics 2024.
• [DB23] Thomas Deliot and Laurent Belcour. "Real‐Time Rendering of Glinty Appearances using Distributed Binomial Laws on Anisotropic Grids." Computer Graphics Forum. Vol. 42. No. 8. 2023.

Project Structure

A copy of the HDRP and core render pipelines are found in the Packages/ directory. Our implementation modifies the HDRP/Lit shader in the HDRP. The relevant entry points for the glint evaluation are found in Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition@14.0.10/Runtime/Material/Lit/Lit.hlsl in the functions

• IndirectLighting EvaluateBSDF_Env(...)
• DirectLighting EvaluateBSDF_Rect(...)
• CBSDF EvaluateBSDF(...)

The binomial/multinomial sampling is then implemented in the files Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition/Runtime/Material/Glints/Glints*.hlsl.

The Unity Project itself contains the demo scene that can be built into an executable.

Precompiled Binaries

Precompiled binaries are available for Linux and Windows.

Filename	sha256sum
IBLGlints-Demo-Linux.tar.gz	e87a87201b7fe76291fa95419fa3db6e924f013e676f3ec09c79b695c5041dd3
IBLGlints-Demo-Windows.zip	052bc4170e70606fd19a579c737a8f4e2250a1ab6e4fece951b5a8c7df8d40c7

Citation

If you are using this code in academic research, please cite our paper. The BibTeX entry is

@article{kneiphof2025real,
  title={Real-time Image-based Lighting of Glints},
  author={Kneiphof, Tom and Klein, Reinhard},
  journal={Computer Graphics Forum},
  year = {2025},
  publisher = {The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.},
  ISSN = {1467-8659},
  DOI = {10.1111/cgf.70175}
}