Practical Real-Time Strategies for Photorealistic Skin Rendering and Antialiasing

Abstract

The first topic of this thesis, photorealistic skin rendering, is of extreme importance to create believable special effects in cinematography,but it has been ignored to an extent by the game industry. However, in the last years, there is a trend towardsmore character-driven, film-like games. This has risen the interest towards photorealisticallydepicting human characters. In contrast with the offline rendering technology used for films, where hours andhours can be spent for rendering, in the practical real-time realm, the time alloted for skin rendering is inthe millisecond range (with even further constraints in games). Our challenge is, then, to match film-qualityskin rendering in runtimes of orders of smaller magnitude, taking into account very fine qualities of the skinappearance, including SSS, facial color changes and wrinkles animation.