Fast Rendering of Realistic Virtual Character in Game Scene

Abstract

Human skin is made up of multiple translucent layers and rendering of skin appearance usually acquire complex modeling and massive calculation. In some practical applications such as 3D game development, we not only approximate the realistic looking skin but also develop efficient method to implement easily for meeting needs of real-time rendering. In this study, we solve the problem of wrap lighting and introduce a surface details approximation method to give realistic rendering of virtual character. Our method considers that different thicknesses of geometry on the skin surface can result in different scattering degree of incident light and so pre- calculate the diffuse falloff into a look-up texture. Also, we notice that scattering is strongly color dependent and small bumps are common on the skin surface and so pre-soften the finer details on the skin surface according to the R/G/B channel. At last, we linearly interpolate the diffuse lighting with different scattering degree from the look-up texture sampled with the curvature and NdotL. Experiment results show that the proposed approach yields realistic virtual character and obtains high frames per second in real-time rendering.