Separable Subsurface Scattering (Real Time)

This movie represents hours and hours of research, desperation, excitement, happiness, pride, sadness and extreme dedication. Hope you like it.

IMPORTANT: designed to be viewed in HD at fullscreen with scaling off on a 1080p device. Be patient and wait for the movie to load before playing, it’s a 1080p movie. Some subtleties are lost in the online version, so I encourage to download the original blu-ray quality version (or the original demo) below, to better appreciate the skin and fine scale render details (but be aware that you will need a powerful computer to play it).

It shows our latest and final advances on real-time skin rendering (Separable Subsurface Scattering), which enables to quickly render skin in just two post-processing passes. Everything is written from scratch using DirectX 10 and rendered in real-time, from the skin to the film grain; if you have a powerful GPU you can download the original demo here:
iryoku.com/separable-sss/downloads/Separable-SSS-DX10-v1.0.exe
iryoku.com/separable-sss/downloads/Separable-SSS-DX10-v1.0.exe.torrent

Furthermore, it also shows how important is the full rendering pipeline if you aim for 1080p close-up shots. 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 and a high quality antialiasing solution. If you fail on any of them, the illusion of looking at a real human will be broken.

More info on my original blog post:
iryoku.com/separable-sss-released

Source code available on GitHub:
github.com/iryoku/separable-sss

Blu-ray quality movie mirror:
iryoku.com/separable-sss/downloads/Separable-SSS.mp4
iryoku.com/separable-sss/downloads/Separable-SSS.torrent

The 3D head scan used for this demo was obtained from Infinite Realities (thanks a lot!):
ir-ltd.net/infinite-3d-head-scan-released

Music from “Transformers: The Score”, composed by Steve Jablonsky: The All Spark.

Special thanks to Josh Checa (joshcheca.com), who shared its artistic skills with me, and helped to make this true.

Leave a comment