Realistic shading of human skin in real time

Abstract

The demand for realistic human characters is driven by interactive application developers worldwide. The look of 3D models in real time graphics is efficiently improved by powerful shader techniques. Today a common technique consists of a simple lighting model combined with textures, which have precalculated illumination included. In this paper we will give an overview of the most recent techniques in skin shading. We present a multifaced implementation of shading techniques by efficiently combining various approaches. Therefore we will explain physical and anatomical backgrounds and refer to relevant papers. In our opinion, this work is a valuable reference assist shader developers in their implementations and adaptions on recent and future graphic hardware.