An Adaptive Sampling Scheme for Real-Time Subsurface Scattering

We present a novel real-time subsurface scattering algorithm that is computed purely on the GPU. It is implemented as pixel shader and works solely in screen space, making it independent from scene complexity. We improve the Translucent Shadow Maps technique by introducing an adaptive hierarchical sub-sampling scheme to exploit the fact that homogeneous surfaces have a smooth contribution to the scattering term. That way it is possible to accurately approximate the scattering integral without banding and blurring artifacts that occur when using fixed sampling pattern.