Photorealistic real‐time rendering of spherical raindrops with hierarchical reflective and refractive maps

Abstract

ABSTRACTSynthesizing rainy images is a common challenge found in film, game engines, driving simulators, and architectural design. Simulating light transport through a raindrop's optical properties is a view‐dependent problem, and large quantities of raindrops are required to produce a plausible rainy scene. Accurate methods for rendering raindrops exist but are often off‐line techniques that are cost prohibitive for real‐time applications. Most real‐time solutions use textures to approximate the appearance of moving raindrops as streaks. These approaches produce plausible results but do not address the problem of temporal effects such as slow‐motion or paused simulations. In such conditions, streak‐based approximations are not suitable, and proper raindrop geometry should be considered. This paper describes a straight‐forward approach for rendering raindrops in such temporal conditions. The proposed technique consists of a preprocessing stage that generates a raindrop mask and a run‐time stage that renders raindrops as screen‐aligned billboards. The mask's contents are adjusted on the basis of the viewpoint, viewing direction, and raindrop position. The proposed method renders millions of raindrops at real‐time rates in current graphics hardware, making it suitable for applications that require high‐visual quality without compromising performance. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.