Great work!!
Looks quite nice.
Skimmed the paper you posted an I am curious.
So the last of us setup said they mapped a bunch of spheres onto the character and used that. I guess that means each screen pixel needs to trace against every sphere for an intersection?
edit ah it doesnt actually raytrace to hit the spheres but rather knows analytically how much they occlude based on size/distance. that makes sense. very neat trick. And then they eventually skip the analytical step by baking the falloff to a texture. Did you get to the texture baking step yet?