Subsurface Scattering for 3D Gaussian Splatting
This work addresses the problem of realistic 3D rendering for scattering materials, which is important for graphics and vision applications, but it is incremental as it builds upon existing 3D Gaussian Splatting methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of reconstructing and relighting objects with subsurface scattering materials by proposing a framework that optimizes shape and radiance transfer from multi-view OLAT data, achieving comparable or better results with faster optimization and rendering times while enabling material editing and interactive relighting.
3D reconstruction and relighting of objects made from scattering materials present a significant challenge due to the complex light transport beneath the surface. 3D Gaussian Splatting introduced high-quality novel view synthesis at real-time speeds. While 3D Gaussians efficiently approximate an object's surface, they fail to capture the volumetric properties of subsurface scattering. We propose a framework for optimizing an object's shape together with the radiance transfer field given multi-view OLAT (one light at a time) data. Our method decomposes the scene into an explicit surface represented as 3D Gaussians, with a spatially varying BRDF, and an implicit volumetric representation of the scattering component. A learned incident light field accounts for shadowing. We optimize all parameters jointly via ray-traced differentiable rendering. Our approach enables material editing, relighting and novel view synthesis at interactive rates. We show successful application on synthetic data and introduce a newly acquired multi-view multi-light dataset of objects in a light-stage setup. Compared to previous work we achieve comparable or better results at a fraction of optimization and rendering time while enabling detailed control over material attributes. Project page https://sss.jdihlmann.com/