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Rendering skin in computer graphics is often tricky, but a coder reckons that he's managed to perfect a light-penetration technique that could yield more realistic faces in games.
Jorge Jiminez has released work using a process called "separable subsurface scattering" (SSS) that allows light to act realistically when moving through translucent surfaces such as skin. While you can't see through your hand, if you put a torch up to it then it'll glow through, and it's this process that SSS is trying to emulate.
The technique has been used for some time at top animation studios like Pixar, but Jiminez has managed to work out a way of doing it on computers with far lower specs in real-time. That means you could see it in the next generation of games engines, running on a future Xbox 720 or PS4.
Jiminez says in a post on his blog: "Efforts towards rendering ultra realistic skin are futile if they are not coupled with HDR, high quality bloom, depth of field, film grain, tone mapping, ultra high quality models, parametrization maps, high quality shadow maps (which are lacking on my demo) and a high quality antialiasing solution. If you fail on any of them, the illusion of looking at a real human will be broken. Specially on close-ups at 1080p, that is where the real skin rendering challenge is."
Reddit user sealclubber points out: "If you were to try to render that same model, at the same level of realism (with SSS) in something like 3DS Max, it would probably take a few minutes, maybe around a half-hour. For one frame. Let that sink in for a moment. This new shader does (practically) the same thing at... what? 60 fps? 100 fps? And it's doing it on a high poly model -- not a low-poly game model -- and it's running on your video card, right now." "I think there is still a lot of work to do," says Jiminez. "Probably the most important one will be rendering realistic facial hair. It will be my dream if my skin research helps to improve the rendering of humans in games; I truly believe that more realistic characters will inevitably lead to deeper storytelling, and more emotionally-driven games."
You can see the rendering process in action in the video above. Watch it in full-screen HD if you can, and ignore the lack of hair, eyes, or animation -- this demo is purely about the skin shading.
Alternatively, if you've got a reasonable graphics card, then you can see how it renders on your computer too.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
