Archive notice: This article was originally published on July 29, 2010. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Luxion, developer of the KeyShot rendering and lighting package, is showing what it describes as the first real-time ray-tracing and global-illumination program capable of tracing the paths of light through real-time subsurface scattering. Human skin, for example, can therefore be lit correctly immediately without “approximate values”.
To do this, KeyShot, now at version 2.1, draws on the award-winning mathematical models of Dr Henrik Wann Jensen, Luxion’s chief developer. The algorithms he developed have already been used successfully in “The Lord of the Rings” and “Avatar”. The techniques are intended to work so efficiently that they do not even require dedicated workstations.
