An Efficient Caching Technique for Rendering Translucent Materials

Abstract

This paper presents an efficient rendering technique for translucent materials using caches. 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.