Screen-space perceptual rendering of human skin

Abstract

We propose a novel skin shader which translates the simulation of subsurface scattering from texture space to a screen-space diffusion approximation. It naturally scales well while maintaining a perceptually plausible result. This technique allows us to ensure real-time performance even when several characters may appear on screen at the same time. The visual realism of the resulting images is validated using a subjective psychophysical preference experiment. Our results show that, independent of distance and light position, the images rendered using our novel shader have as high visual realism as a previously developed physically-based shader.