Speaker: Christian Freude
One of the many challenges in computer graphics is the computation of photo-realistic images. Although off-line rendering methods are already capable to produce such images for various scenarios, real-time rendering naturally lags behind due to its limited time constraints. However, due to the fast increase in computational power and the development of modern GPUs throughout the last decade, more and more effects, which were previously exclusive to off-line rendering, are now possible in real-time.
One example is subsurface scattering (SSS), which plays an important role in the appearance of many materials e.g. Skin, Marble or Milk. SSS occurs when light is not immediately reflected at the surface of a material, but enters at one point and leaves at a different location. Inside the material this light may get scattered multiple times before it exits the material or it may get absorbed.
Despite the importance for SSS regarding the realistic appearance of many surfaces and materials it is often ignored to increase rendering performance. Although this effect is also challenging for off-line methods, recent methods have shown that rendering of SSS, in particular for human skin, can be achieved in real-time. The aim of this thesis is to extend and improve such methods to support the rendering of physically based SSS for arbitrary materials and dynamic scenes in real-time.