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Authors
Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
Modeling, simulation, and realistic rendering of natural phenomena have been important goals in computer graphics for decades. Clouds, as a natural phenomenon, represent a real challenge because their birth, life, and death are amorphous and dynamic in nature. As a consequence, cloud simulation is very time-consuming when using physically-based methods. This paper presents a real-time cloud simulation method based on SkewT/LogP diagrams to overcome this time performance problem. These diagrams allow us to simulate 3D clouds from sounding data made public worldwide by weather agencies. More specifically, a SkewT/LogP diagram describes the vertical motion of a cloud in the atmosphere, i.e., our cloud simulator system is based on physics but avoids solving differential equations of cloud motion to achieve real-time rates. We have also built a visual tool for 2D SkewT/LogP diagrams that allows us to inspect, control and simulate the thermodynamic process of ascending clouds in the atmosphere, as well as a 3D synthetic environment where clouds are advected by buoyant forces. This lightweight physically-based technique enables the incorporation of our cloud simulator in systems tied to important industries, namely movies, virtual environments, and video games.
Description
Keywords
Cloud simulation Cloud rendering Physically-based methods SkewT/LogP diagrams
Citation
Duarte, R. P. A., & Gomes, A. J. P. (2017). Real-time simulation of cumulus clouds through skewT/logP diagrams. Proceedings of the 33rd Spring Conference on Computer Graphics, 1. https://doi.org/10.1145/3154353.3154368