Disclosed approaches may leverage the actual spatial and reflective properties of a virtual environment—such as the size, shape, and orientation of a bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) lobe of a light path and its position relative to a reflection surface, a virtual screen, and a virtual camera—to produce, for a pixel, an anisotropic kernel filter having dimensions and weights that accurately reflect the spatial characteristics of the virtual environment as well as the reflective properties of the surface. In order to accomplish this, geometry may be computed that corresponds to a projection of a reflection of the BRDF lobe below the surface along a view vector to the pixel. Using this approach, the dimensions of the anisotropic filter kernel may correspond to the BRDF lobe to accurately reflect the spatial characteristics of the virtual environment as well as the reflective properties of the surface.