| Submitted by , posted on 09 July 2001 |

Image Description, by This is a screenshot of something I've been working on for my final year project as a computing student at Imperial College (in London, UK). The project is based on cloud rendering, and is based on a paper which can be found at http://www.eml.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/~doba/papers/sig00_cloud.pdf.
My work runs at interactive frame rates (for interactive read > 1 fps on my Celeron 433 with GeForce 2 MX 200). It quite happily pushes the graphics card as far as it will go, and that's the bottleneck. I think it can be sped up to reach real interactive frame rates with some more optimization though...
The method uses a large 3d array to store the clouds, the cells of which are then rendered as metaball textures on billboards. Oh, and it uses Open GL for rendering purposes.
The work also implements http://www.cs.utah.edu/vissim/papers/sunsky/ to draw the sky correctly, and (though you can't see it) the sun will rise, move through the sky and then set again. In fact it's just setting in this picture, as you might have noticed from the orange glow along the horizon...
And before anyone asks, no, you can't have a demo. It's not finished (and it's never likely to be either... :-).

[prev] | Image of the Day Gallery www.flipcode.com | [next]

Copyright 1999-2008 (C) FLIPCODE.COM and/or the original content author(s). All rights reserved.
Please read our Terms, Conditions, and Privacy information.