Face rendering is a really important topic in Computer Graphics because a lot of virtual simulations or video games contain virtual humans. In order to obtain a realistic face, we need to take care of skin rendering. Nowadays, we can use modern 3D scanning technology to obtain very detailed meshes and textures for the face but the main difficulty with skin rendering is that we need to model subsurface scattering effects. In 2007, d’Eon, Eugene, David Luebke, and Eric Enderton published the article “Efficient Rendering of Human Skin” that describe an algorithm for rendering realistic skin in real-time.
The goal of my work was to implement their algorithm on the GPU to simulate subsurface scattering in skin in real-time. I have also implemented diffuse environment lighting with occlusions using spherical harmonics. This was a semester project that has been done in the Computer Graphics and Geometry Laboratory (LGG) at EPFL in 2010.
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