Interactive and Realistic Visualization System for Earth-Scale Clouds
Pacific Graphics (poster) 2009, Science China (2010)
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Yoshinori Dobashi1 Tsuyoshi Yamamoto1 Tomoyuki Nishita2
1Hokkaido University, 2The Unversity of Tokyo
Abstract
This paper presents an interactive system for realistic visualization of earth-scale clouds. Realistic
images can be generated at interactive frame rates while the viewpoint and the sunlight directions can be changed
interactively. The realistic display of earth-scale clouds requires us to render large volume data representing the
density distribution of the clouds. However, this is generally time-consuming and it is difficult to achieve the
interactive performance, especially when the sunlight direction can be changed. To address this, our system
precomputes the integrated intensities and opacities of clouds for various viewing and sunlight directions. This
idea is combined with a novel hierarchical data structure for further acceleration. The photorealism of the final
image is improved by taking into account the atmospheric effects and shadows of clouds on the earth. We
demonstrate the usefulness of our system by an application to a space flight simulation.
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