A New Method for Fast Simulation of 3D Clouds

The dynamic cloud simulation has been widely used in computer games, flight simulation, movie and TV advertisement, etc. Realistic simulation of cloud scene has been a research hotspot in the field of computer graphics. Although there are many previous works about simulation of static cloud scene, few attentions has been paid to simulation of dynamic cloud scene. The current methods of dynamic cloud simulation fall into two categories. One is heuristic methods and the other is physics based methods. The former can achieve fast rendering rates, but the results are less realistic. The latter can generate more realistic results. However, they need a large amount of computation. So a method which can take both rendering results and rendering rates into account is needed. The authors present a novel method for a fast simulation of 3D dynamic cloud scene. First, the velocity field of dynamic cloud is obtained by solving the physical equations of motion of dynamic cloud in a grid with relatively low resolution. Then, the texture advection is employed to add the details of the appearance of cloud. By fully accelerating with GPU (graphics processing units), high rendering rates are achieved. Finally, the method is further optimized and can be applied in many types of hardware.