Creation and control of rain in virtual environments

Abstract

Realistic outdoor scenarios often include rain and other atmospheric phenomena, which are difficult to simulate in real time. In the field of real-time applications, a number of solutions have been proposed which offer realistic but costly rain systems. Our proposal consists in developing a solution to facilitate the creation and control of rain scenes and to improve on previously used methods while offering a realistic appearance of rain. Firstly, we create and define the areas in which it is raining. Secondly, we perform a suitable management of the particle systems inside them. We include multiresolution techniques in order to adapt the number of particles, their location and their size according to the view conditions. Furthermore, in this work the physical properties of rain are analyzed and its features are incorporated into the final approach that we propose. The presented method is completely integrated in the GPU. We offer a solution which is fast, simple, efficient and easily integrated into existing virtual-reality environments.