Real-time Photo-Realistic Physically Based Rendering of Fine Scale Human Skin Structure

Skin is noticeably bumpy in character, which is clearly visible in close-up shots in a film or game. Methods that rely on simple texture-mapping of faces lack such high frequency shape detail, which makes them look non-realistic. More specifically, this detail is usually ignored in real-time applications, or is drawn in manually by an artist. In this paper, we present techniques for capturing and rendering the fine scale structure of human skin. First, we present a method for creating normal maps of skin with a high degree of accuracy from physical data. We also present techniques inspired by texture synthesis to “grow” skin normal maps to cover the face. Finally, we demonstrate how such skin models can be rendered in real-time on consumer-end graphics hardware.