A Phenomenological Model for Throughfall Rendering in Real-time

Abstract

This paper aims at rendering interactive visual effects inherent to complex interactions between trees and rain in real-time in order to increase the realism of natural rainy scenes. Such a complex phenomenon involves a great number of physical processes influenced by various interlinked factors and its rendering represents a thorough challenge in Computer Graphics.We approach this problem by introducing an original method to render drops dripping from leaves after interception of raindrops by foliage. Our method introduces a new hydrological model representing interactions between rain and foliage through a phenomenological approach. Our model reduces the complexity of the phenomenon by representing multiple dripping drops with a new fully functional form evaluated per-pixel on-the-fly and providing improved control over density and physical properties. Furthermore, an efficient real-time rendering scheme, taking full advantage of latest GPU hardware capabilities, allows the rendering of a large number of dripping drops even for complex scenes.