Efficiently Rendering Gobs and Gobs of Particles
Jerry Tessendorf
May, 2002
Software has been developed and deployed which is able to render unlimited numbers of particles in very low amounts of RAM. This approach also generates volumetric lighting and opacity, including self-shadowing, making the particle renderer an efficient volume renderer. The algorithms combine several channels of alpha and depth data with techniques to transform the hiding and shadow map problems to a compositing operation.