Blurry when wet: animating raindrop behavior

Abstract

In this article, we introduce a simple but efficient approach to real-time animation of raindrop behavior on windshields and generate the visual effects caused by raindrops. This method differs from existing work because it doesn't construct 3-D water droplets or use ray-tracing algorithms. Instead, it applies a partial-distortion method to approximate water droplets and their visual effects on a windshield. Each water droplet acts as an optical lens that deforms the glass area it covers. A simple nonlinear deformation model is use to distort the droplet-covered areas in the final 3-D images in the frame buffer. Experimental results show that our method can achieve realistic, real-time animation on typical end-user PCs.