Lighting and materials for real-time game engines
2009-11-05 by Tobias Kruseborn
The aim of this thesis was to study and implement advanced real-time rendering techniques for complex materials such as human skin. The project included investigation on how to adapt and simplify complex skin rendering models to fit current game engines. Also, the task included looking into recent research on spherical harmonics and wavelets. The goal was to determine whether they can be used to represent both diffuse and specular reflection from an environment lighting in a real time game. Subsurface scattering, Gaussian shadow mapping and representing lighting by the use of spherical harmonics and wavelets, are a few of the used techniques in this project. The results of this thesis show that it is possible to render realistic human skin in real time at a low cost. When wavelets are combined with skin rendering techniques, a high-quality method is established for rendering complex materials from environment light. This thesis was written at Digital Illusions and CSC at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in the spring of 2009.