Making images of clouds with a silver lining

What is it about?

Every cloud has a silver lining: When you look at a cloud in the sky, its bottom will look dark but the parts on the rim, where the sun can reach, are brightly lit. That's because the cloud casts shadows onto itself. When you want to make an image of a virtual 3D world with clouds or smoke in it, you have to compute how much each part is shadowed. This work presents a new way to do that accurately and efficiently.

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Photo by Chris Linnett on Unsplash

Photo by Chris Linnett on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Many industries rely on rendering to make images of virtual scenes: Games, movies, TV, advertising, product design, virtual reality and many more. Nowadays, this is often done with GPUs. Previous ways to compute shadows from clouds were either inaccurate or took a lot of computation time on GPUs. Our new method is almost perfectly accurate, while being as fast as inaccurate alternatives. That makes it viable to use it in applications like games, where such shadow tests may need to be performed billions of times per second for different points.

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