Real-time single scattering inside inhomogeneous materials

In this paper we propose a novel technique to perform real-time rendering of translucent inhomogeneous materials, one of the most well known problems of Computer Graphics. The developed technique is based on an adaptive volumetric point sampling, done in a preprocessing stage, which associates to each sample the optical depth for a predefined set of directions. This information is then used by a rendering algorithm that combines the object's surface rasterization with a ray tracing algorithm, implemented on the graphics processor, to compose the final image. This approach allows us to simulate light scattering phenomena for inhomogeneous isotropic materials in real time with an arbitrary number of light sources. We tested our algorithm by comparing the produced images with the result of ray tracing and showed that the technique is effective.