Real-Time Translucent Rendering Using GPU-based Texture Space Importance Sampling

 

          

 

Overview

 

We present a novel approach for real-time rendering of translucent surfaces. The computation of subsurface scattering is performed by first converting the integration over the 3D model surface into integration over a 2D texture space and then applying importance sampling based on the irradiance stored in the texture. Such a conversion leads to a feasible GPU implementation and makes real-time frame rate possible. Our implementation shows that plausible images can be rendered in real time for complex translucent models with dynamic light and material properties. For objects with more apparent local effect, our approach generally requires more samples that may downgrade the frame rate. To deal with this case, we decompose the integration into two parts, one for local effect and the other for global effect, which are evaluated by a modified local subsurface scattering method and our texture space importance sampling, respectively. Such a hybrid scheme is able to steadily render the translucent effect in real time with a fixed amount of samples.

 

Publications

 

·        Chih-Wen Chang, Wen-Chieh Lin, Tan-Chi Ho, Tsung-Shian Huang and Jung-Hong Chuang, Real-Time Translucent Rendering Using GPU-based Texture Space Importance Sampling, Computer Graphics Forum (Eurographics 2008), Vol. 27, No. 2, 2008, pp 517-526.

 

Links to results

 

EG’08_fastforward

 

Dynamic lighting

 

Dynamic material

 

Comparison with Local Subsurface Scattering

 

Results on different models

 

 

Code (note that the code is no longer maintained)