“Practical level-of-detail aggregation of fur appearance” by Zhu, Zhao, Wang, Xu and Yan

Fur appearance rendering is crucial for the realism of computer generated imagery, but is also a challenge in computer graphics for many years. Much effort has been made to accurately simulate the multiple-scattered light transport among fur fibers, but the computation cost is still very high, since the number of fur fibers is usually extremely large. In this paper, we aim at reducing the number of fur fibers while preserving realistic fur appearance. We present an aggregated fur appearance model, using one thick cylinder to accurately describe the aggregated optical behavior of a bunch of fur fibers, including the multiple scattering of light among them. Then, to acquire the parameters of our aggregated model, we use a lightweight neural network to map individual fur fiber’s optical properties to those in our aggregated model. Finally, we come up with a practical heuristic that guides the simplification process of fur dynamically at different bounces of the light, leading to a practical level-of-detail rendering scheme. Our method achieves nearly the same results as the ground truth, but performs 3.8×-13.5× faster.

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