Los Angeles, Calif. - Luxion, a developer of advanced rendering and lighting technology and makers of the KeyShot real-time ray tracing and global illumination program, announced its real-time raytraced subsurface scattering solution. The new offering makes it possible to render realistic natural materials, such as human skin, interactively and in real time, without any approximations, says a representative.
The subsurface scattering algorithms represent the next generation of the Academy Award-winning work by Dr. Henrik Wann Jensen, chief scientist at Luxion. Dr. Jensen and the team at Luxion achieved the breakthrough by using new sophisticated mathematical algorithms that make it possible to rapidly compute the effect of complex natural lighting on translucent materials.
Luxion showed at SIGGRAPH 2010 a fully interactive raytraced human head with subsurface scattering, where the skin is rendered using the true optical properties of human skin. This technology is likely to revolutionize film making as it can eliminate the traditional long rendering times faced by modern movie productions.
These subsurface scattering algorithms run on both PC and Mac without the need for special hardware. Even laptops are capable of rendering high-quality raytraced images with subsurface scattering interactively.
In addition to subsurface scattering, KeyShot 2.1 adds multi-host real-time ray tracing which can utilize multiple machines for interactive rendering.
KeyShot 2.1 also integrates support for GPUs for additional rendering effects. KeyShot 2.1 is using open standards for the GPU component and runs well on any graphics card.