Practical Inverse Rendering of Textured and Translucent Appearance

Philippe Weier1,2     Jérémy Riviere1     Ruslan Guseinov1     Stephan Garbin1     Philipp Slusallek3,2     Bernd Bickel1     Thabo Beeler1     Delio Vicini1    
1Google, 2Saarland University, 3DFKI
ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH), 2025
Teaser

Inverse reconstruction of high-frequency normal maps and subsurface scattering (SSS) parameters on a synthetic scene. Left column: Starting from known geometry and lighting, we reconstruct appearance textures of the snail using differentiable path tracing. We fit normal maps, SSS albedo maps as well as uniform, spectrally-varying extinction and phase function parameters from synthetic multi-view data consisting of five camera views and eight lighting conditions (obtained by rotating the ground-truth environment lighting). Center column: Our method reconstructs appearance textures that allow high-quality re-rendering. Right column: We show insets comparing both rendering and recovered normal maps to the corresponding ground truth.

Abstract

Inverse rendering has emerged as a standard tool to reconstruct the parameters of appearance models from images (e.g., textured BSDFs). In this work, we present several novel contributions motivated by the practical challenges of recovering high-resolution surface appearance textures, including spatially-varying subsurface scattering parameters. First, we propose Laplacian mipmapping, which combines differentiable mipmapping and a Laplacian pyramid representation into an effective preconditioner. This seemingly simple technique significantly improves the quality of recovered surface textures on a set of challenging inverse rendering problems. Our method automatically adapts to the render and texture resolutions, only incurs moderate computational cost and achieves better quality than prior work while using fewer hyperparameters. Second, we introduce a specialized gradient computation algorithm for textured, path-traced subsurface scattering, which facilitates faithful reconstruction of translucent materials. By using path tracing, we enable the recovery of complex appearance while avoiding the approximations of the previously used diffusion dipole methods. Third, we demonstrate the application of both these techniques to reconstructing the textured appearance of human faces from sparse captures. Our method recovers high-quality relightable appearance parameters that are compatible with current production renderers.

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Philippe Weier, Jérémy Riviere, Ruslan Guseinov, Stephan Garbin, Philipp Slusallek, Bernd Bickel, Thabo Beeler, Delio Vicini. Practical Inverse Rendering of Textured and Translucent Appearance. ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH), 44(4), August 2025.

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@article{Weier2025PracticalInverse,
  title   = {Practical Inverse Rendering of Textured and Translucent Appearance},
  author  = {Philippe Weier and J\'{e}r\'{e}my Riviere and Ruslan Guseinov and Stephan Garbin and Philipp Slusallek and Bernd Bickel and Thabo Beeler and Delio Vicini},
  year    = 2025,
  month   = aug,
  journal = {Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH)},
  volume  = 44,
  number  = 4,
  doi     = {10.1145/3730855}
}