What is the blog?

This blog is a re-interpretation of the tessendorf.org website I had for several years. At the moment I am putting up the papers and reports page. Eventually I will put up the other pages on frumple and old Arete Image Software materials. You can also find this information at my university page

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Efficient Rendering of Atmospheric Phenomena
Kirk Riley, David S. Ebert, Martin Kraus, Jerry Tessendorf, and Charles Hansen
September, 2004
Eurographics Symposium on Rendering, H. W. Jensen and A. Keller (eds), 2004
Rendering of atmospheric bodies involves modeling the complex interaction of light throughout the highly scattering medium of water and air particles. Scattering by these particles creates many well-known atmospheric optical phenomena including rainbows, halos, the corona, and the glory. Unfortunately, most radiative transport approximations in computer graphics are ill-suited to render complex angularly dependent effects in the presence of multiple scattering at reasonable frame rates. Therefore, this paper introduces a multiple-model lighting system that efficiently captures these essential atmospheric effects. We have solved the rendering of fine angularly dependent effects in the presence of multiple scattering by designing a lighting approximation based upon multiple scattering phase functions. This model captures gradual blurring of chromatic atmospheric optical phenomena by handling the gradual angular spreading of the sunlight as it experiences multiple scattering events with anisotropic scattering particles. It has been designed to take advantage of modern graphics hardware; thus, it is capable of rendering these effects at near interactive frame rates.