Karabchevskiy V., Luntovskaya A.

This paper is devoted to the real-time visualization of atmospheric precipitation in natural scenes. Article contains a review of precipitation simulation methods and methods of modeling precipitation interaction with an environment. Natural scenes simulation is one of the main directions in computer graphics research. Number of studies devoted to improve realism of natural phenomena visualization and rendering speed in dynamic natural scenes is growing every year. These questions are especially relevant in game development where realistic game environment often becomes the main criteria of game success. If talking about real-time games, rendering of weather events such as atmospheric precipitation should find a balance between realism and rendering speed. A huge number of raindrops and snowflakes is a heavy burden for computer calculation. In addition, every drop has many properties, such as size, weight, speed, acceleration etc. Therefore, a realistic and effective representation of scenes with precipitation by increasing the rendering speed and reducing computational expense is not an easy task. The goal of this article is to explore methods and algorithms of atmospheric precipitation simulation and to find the optimal ratio of realistic imaging of precipitation in real time and computational expense. Rendering method proposed in the article is based on the particle system usage. Simulation process is accelerated by using methods of texture mapping and multitexturing, running on the graphics processing unit. Precipitation simulation is made in view of its physical properties, which are also discussed in the article. Obtained modeling results will be used to create dynamic real-time gaming environment. Keywords: natural phenomena, precipitation, particle system, real-time rendering, physically based modeling

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