Rapid and authentic rendering of translucent materials using depth-maps from multi-viewpoint

We present a real-time rendering method of translucent materials with complex shape by estimating object's thickness between light source and view point precisely. Wang et al. [2010] has already proposed a real-time rendering method treating arbitrary shapes, but it requires such huge computational costs and graphics memories that it is very difficult to implement in a practical rendering pipe-line. Inside a trans-lucent object, the energy of incident light attenuates highly depends on the object's optical thickness. Translucent Shadow Maps (TSM) [2003] is able to compute object's thickness using depth map at light position. However, TSM is not able to calculate thickness accurately in concave objects. In this paper, we propose a novel technique to compute object's thickness precisely and as a result, we achieve a real-time rendering of translucent materials with complex shapes only by adding one render-ing pass to conventional TSM. Copyright is held by the author / owner(s).