Overview
Research focusing on a new technique for generating and rendering volumetric, convective clouds. The technique uses two models, one for generating the spatial and temporal distribution of water density and the other for photon transport, that is, lighting the water density with correct anisotropic scattering. The two models share a common structure, and each provides a physical basis for its own task. The common structure is easily mapped to parallel execution environments, in particular, to current generation GPUs, where execution times show dramatic improvements over those achieved on cpus. For example, lighting the clouds shown below required 21 seconds on a single NVIDIA G80 Quadro, compared to 15 minutes on a 2.0GHz AMD Opteron 246.
Paper
Contact
rmg at cs dot clemson dot edu
jesteel at cs dot clemson dot edu
westall at cs dot clemson dot edu
Movie
Fly around movie (3.0M)
Images
The following images were generated using the same initial conditions but different random seeds.
Composite images.
Random images.
