A survey of modeling, rendering and animation of clouds in computer graphics

Abstract

Clouds play an important role in enhancing the realism of outdoor scenes in computer graphics (CG). Realistic cloud generation is a challenging task, which entails processes such as modeling, photorealistic rendering and simulation of the clouds. To these ends, several techniques have been proposed within the CG community in the last 4 decades with one or more of the above stated focuses. The growth of modern hardware has also enabled development of techniques that can achieve cloud display and animation at interactive frame rates. In this survey, we review the prominent work in the domain and also summarize the evolution of the research over the time.