Soft Shadows and Glossy Surfaces
I spent a lot of time to get the glossiness working and finally I got the glossiness correctly as in the below image. I used random sampling for the soft shadows - using which I am getting a better soft shadows. Earlier, for glossy reflection, I was not getting convincing results - seems there was something wrong with my sphere sampling technique. I tried various ways to do the sampling but all are giving, more or less, same results but it didn't work out. Later on I finally figured out why it wasn't working.
Sampling used for above Image*:
r1 = RandomNumber(0, 1);
r2 = 1 - r1;
phi = 2 * M_PI * r1;
theta = acos(1 - (2 * r2));
x = 2 * radius * cos(2 * M_PI * r1) * sqrt(r2*(1 - r2));
y = 2 * radius * sin(2 * M_PI * r1) * sqrt(r2*(1 - r2));
z = radius*(1 - (2 * r2));
Sampling used for above Image^:
r1 = RandomNumber(0, 1)
r2 = 1 - r1
z = 1 - 2 * r1;
radius = radius * sqrt(1 - (offset.z * offset.z));
theta = 2 * M_PI * r2;
x = radius*cosf(theta);
y = radius*sinf(theta);
No. of Samples per pixel - min = 8, max = 64
Threads = 10
Reference
System Information
CPU : Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4790 CPU @ 3.60GHz
Memory: 32 GB DDR3 @ 1600 MHz
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M