Real-time physically based snake scale rendering

Abstract

There are thousands of types of snakes in the world, and many of them have a unique snake skin appearance caused by the complex structure on their surface. To create and render physically realistic snake skins in application in real time, we need to efficiently and accurately express the visual effects that snake skins should have. In our work, we model the complex multi-layer structure of the snake skin surface as a multi-layer BRDF and integrate it into a physically based rendering model. We show the results of using this lighting model to render snakes under different parameters and configurations, and show that our model can match the appearance of real-life snake skin to a certain extent. We also implement a procedural texture generation model that can synthesize various textured skin patterns of snakes and efficiently provide the special texture required for our proposed model. The generator uses image processing to generate textures. The results show good visual similarity to the real snake skins.