Jennifer Liu — CPE473 Final Project
Overview
The purpose of this project was to explore rendering skin using a raytracer.
Two main methods were explored—one was purely visual, generating a pov-ray file that would render skin.
The way to go about this was to have 3 refractive nested spheres, each representing a layer in the skin. The top would
be the dermis; the middle was the blood; the bottom was the muscle.
![](images/skinbloodmuscle.jpg)
figure 1
Once put together, they became figure 2
![](images/skin1.jpg)
figure 2
![](images/skintypes.jpg)
Different skin types: left: cheek; middle: normal skin; right: palm/fingertips
The second method that was explored was using the monte carlo method to approximate light-scattering in skin.
As you will see, my implementation was crude and unsuccessful in terms of rendering skin.
![](images/recurse_simp2.jpg)
Simple scene. Note the red seen on the right sphere that has nothing to do with reflection!
![](images/skin.jpg)
Not correct, but skin does reflect light in weird ways.
Some Useful Sources
All you ever wanted to know/see about skin