Real-Time Simulation of Single and Multiple Scattering of Light

It is significant to simulate scattering of light within media for realistic image synthesis; however, this requires costly computation. This paper introduces a practical image-space approximation technique for interactive subsurface scattering. We use a general two-pass approach, which creates transmitted irradiance samples onto shadow maps and computes illumination using the shadow maps. We estimate single scattering efficiently using a method similar to common shadow mapping with adaptive deterministic sampling. A hierarchical technique is applied to evaluate multiple scattering, based on a diffusion theory. We further accelerate rendering speed by tabulating complex functions and utilizing level of detail. We demonstrate that our technique produces high-quality images of animated scenes with blurred shadow at hundreds frames per second on graphics hardware. It can be integrated into existing interactive systems easily.