Faster Rendering of Human Skin

Rendering realistic human skin is not a trivial task. It means dealing with light diffusion in a multi-layered material, where multiple subsurface scattering events take place. Great care must be taken when simulating its appearance, to avoid an unnatural, waxy look. Recent works in the field of computer graphics have provided us with the ability to accurately render human skin, both off-line and in real time. The latter takes advantage of modern graphics hardware, defining light diffusion in texture space. In this paper we leverage this framework and optimize the irradiance map calculations, which simulate light diffusion in skin. We present three simple yet effective improvements implemented on top of the state-of-the-art, real-time rendering algorithm published by d’Eon et al. We achieve maximum speed-ups in excess of 2.7x using the same hardware configuration. Our implementation scales well, and is particularly efficient in multiple-character scenarios. This should be specially useful for real-time realistic human skin rendering for crowds.