The standard approach to modeling the way surfaces reflect light assumes that the surfaces are smooth at the pixel level. But that’s not the case in the real world for metallic materials as well as fabrics, wood finishes and wood grain, among others. As a result, with current methods, these surfaces will appear noisy, grainy or glittery. “There is currently no algorithm that can efficiently render the rough appearance of real specular surfaces. This is highly unusual in modern computer graphics, where almost any other scene can be rendered given enough computing power.”

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