Real-time rendering of subsurface scattering according to translucency magnitude

Abstract

To synthesize realistic translucent materials in computer graphics, it is necessary to simulate the effect of subsurface scattering. In previous works, several methods are proposed for rendering such materials in real-time. The screen space subsurface scattering (SSSS) is developed by Jimenez et al. [2009], yet the speed of rendering is not very practical for low-end computational environment, because screen space techniques require huge number of texture samplings. We previously propose a curvature-based shading method [Kubo et al. 2010] which approximates the effect of subsurface scattering according to the curvature. Since the curvature is determined by the surface shape of neighbors, it is not able to compute the effect of scattering light from the behind of the object. In this paper, we propose a novel shading method depending on the translucency magnitude which represents the significance of the subsurface scattering effect. According to the translucency magnitude, we modulate the reflectance to imitate the effect of subsurface scattering. Since this modulation is very simple to compute, we are able to render translucent materials in real-time not only in high-end workstations but also low-end mobile devices.