A Study on polarization in real-time ray tracing

Abstract

In the game graphics, Fresnel's equation using Schlick's approximation is often used for the reflectance of rays in ray tracing. However, specular reflection, which is good for ray tracing, tends to cause polarization effects, and it is thought that the difference from Schlick's approximation is likely to appear in rendering results. We evaluated the difference when considering the polarization of the light propagation and verified the speedup techniques on the considering the polarization.