Subsurface scattering using splat-based diffusion in point-based rendering

Point-based graphics has gained much attention as an alternative to polygon-based approaches because of its simplicity and flexibility. However, current point-based techniques do not provide a sufficient rendering quality for translucent materials such as human skin. In this paper, we propose a point-based framework with subsurface scattering of light, which is important to create the soft and semi-translucent appearance of human skin. To accurately simulate subsurface scattering in multilayered materials, we present splat-based diffusion to apply a linear combination of several Gaussian basis functions to each splat in object space. Compared to existing point-based approaches, our method offers a significantly improved visual quality in rendering human faces and provides a similar visual quality to polygon-based rendering using the texture space diffusion technique. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in rendering scanned faces realistically.