Real-Time Cloud Rendering

Abstract

This paper presents a method for realistic real-time rendering of clouds suitable for flight simulation and games. It provides a cloud shading algorithm that approximates multiple forward scattering in a preprocess, and first order anisotropic scattering at runtime. Impostors are used to accelerate cloud rendering by exploiting frame-to-frame coherence in an interactive flight simulation. Impostors are shown to be particularly well suited to clouds, even in circumstances under which they cannot be applied to the rendering of polygonal geometry. The method allows hundreds of clouds and hundreds of thousands of particles to be rendered at high frame rates, and improves interaction with clouds by reducing artifacts introduced by direct particle rendering techniques.