Real-time skin rendering on graphics hardware

We present a real-time algorithm for skin rendering which was used in the real-time animation Ruby: The DoubleCross, appearing in this year’s SIGGRAPH animation festival. Our approach approximates the appearance of subsurface scattering by blurring the diffuse illumination in texture space using graphics hardware. This approach, based on the offline skin rendering technique proposed by Borshukov and Lewis, gives a realistic look and is both efficient and easy to implement. We describe algorithms to efficiently implement this technique in real-time using graphics hardware, as well as several enhancements to improve quality.