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Proxy scattering

Photorealism is quite important for CG artists, especially in the VFX world, where recreating digital hair or building visible car-paint flakes is paramount. The ever-increasing demand for realism has pushed the animation industry into adding more visual complexity. To create such realistic images, attention to detail plays an important role. They are details that we don’t consciously become aware of, but recreating it can be a challenging task. For car rendering, this means keeping minute detail, such as scratches, paint flakes, and other subtle effects, especially when an object is far away from the camera.

Bump-Roughness is a way to take these geometric details and convert them to roughness when filtering. This avoids the dependence of brute force sampling to find these micro details. It is possible that a scratch will not be sampled, forcing the user to increase sampling so that the renderer can find these small details. This can have an impact on render times. Even though bump-roughness is great for paint flakes and clear coat scratches, its usefulness doesn't stop there, it can be used to significantly improve render times by adding detail without having to increase sampling.