The disclosure provides an approach for rendering heterogeneous polydisperse granular media. In one aspect, a rendering application renders such granular media using a combination of explicit path tracing and accelerated path construction using proxy path tracing, shell tracing, and volumetric path tracing. In proxy path tracing in particular, the rendering application instantiates proxy geometry in the form of a bounding sphere and determines internal scattering in the grain using a precomputed grain scattering distribution function that relates incident and outgoing radiance functions on the bounding sphere. In shell tracing, the rendering application uses shells to aggregate many grain interactions into a single step. The rendering application derives a continuous liquid/volume equivalent to the granular material based on the material's optical properties and selects a precomputed shell transport function (STF) to use from a database by interpolating nearby database entries using radiative transfer equation (RTE) parameters at the shell's center.