A Lighting Model for General Participating Media

Abstract

Efficient and visually compelling reproduction of effects due to multiple scattering in participating media remains one of the most difficult tasks in computer graphics. Although several fast techniques were recently developed, most of them work only for special types of media (for example, uniform or sufficiently dense) or require extensive precomputation. In this paper we present a lighting model for the general case of inhomogeneous medium and demonstrate its implementation on programmable graphics hardware. It is capable of producing high quality imagery at interactive frame rates with only mild assumptions about medium scattering properties and a moderate amount of simple precomputation.

Paper

A Lighting Model for General Participating Media
Accepted for publication. Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games, April 2005, Washington DC, USA
Kyle Hegeman, Michael Ashikhmin and Simon Premoze

Video

A video (30MB) of our results is available in Quicktime MPEG-4 format.

Window

The appearance of participating media changes dramatically as medium density (or scattering coefficient) is increased from left to right. Multiple scattering contributes little to the left image but dominates the image on the right. The spatial density distribution is identical in all cases. Images are produced at 3 fps using the new model.

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