Techniques are provided for at least modeling any one of mesostructure shadowing, masking, interreflection and silhouettes on a surface, as well as subsurface scattering within a non-homogeneous volume. Such techniques include, at least, acquiring material parameters for a material sample, determining irradiance distribution values for the material sample, synthesizing the material sample onto a mesh of an object. The synthesized object may then be rendered by one of plural rendering techniques.