An efficient caching-based rendering of translucent materials

Abstract

This paper presents an efficient caching-based rendering technique for translucent materials. The proposed caching scheme, inspired by the irradiance caching method, is integrated into a hierarchical rendering technique for translucent materials. We propose a split-disk model to determine the cache distribution and derive the subsurface illuminance gradient used for interpolation by reformulating the equation of dipole diffusion approximation as a 3D convolution process. Our experiments show that only a few caches are required to interpolate the entire image, while the visual difference is negligible. The speedup could be achieved up to one order of magnitude.