Physically Based Rendering of Stone Statues with Translucence

Final Rendering Project Proposal - Jonathan Huang

Click Here to go to the final project page

            In this project, I hope to gain an understanding of the subsurface scattering phenomenon, particularly in stone. This phenomenon is captured in a BSSRDF, which is simply a generalization of a BRDF. In the BRDF, we have the restriction that outgoing light must leave at the same point that incoming light enters a surface. Not so with the BSSRDF. Subsurface scattering occurs everywhere in nature - in fact, all non-metallic materials are to some degree, translucent. Translucence manifests itself in a very beautiful way in stone statues, especially with materials such as jade or marble.
            My goals are to implement this in LRT, and use a photon mapping method to render it as described in Henrik Wann Jensen's book. If all is successful and I have time, I hope to also add functionality so that the stone can be rendered when wet.



Here are some example images - the first two are photographs, and the others are rendered using a BSSRDF model





Some papers that will be useful:

A Practical Model for Subsurface Light Transport
Henrik Wann Jensen, Steve Marschner, Marc Levoy, and Pat Hanrahan
Proceedings of SIGGRAPH'2001, pages 511-518, Los Angeles, August 2001
A Rapid Hierarchical Rendering Technique for Translucent Materials
Henrik Wann Jensen and Juan Buhler
Proceedings of SIGGRAPH'2002, pages 576-581, San Antonio, July 2002
Rendering of Wet Materials
Henrik Wann Jensen, Justin Legakis, and Julie Dorsey
Rendering Techniques '99 Eds. D. Lischinski and G.W. Larson. Springer-Verlag, pages 273-282, 1999
Modeling and Rendering of Weathered Stone
Julie Dorsey, Alan Edelman, Henrik Wann Jensen, Justin Legakis, and Hans Kohling Pedersen
Proceedings of SIGGRAPH'99, pages 225-234, Los Angeles, August 1999