Efficient Light Propagation for Multiple Anisotropic Volume Scattering

Abstract

Realistic rendering of participating media like clouds requires multiple anisotropic light scattering. This paper presents a propagation approximation for light scattered into M direction bins, which reduces the "ray effect" problem in the traditional "discrete ordinates" method. For a regular grid volume of n 3 elements, it takes O(M n 3 log n + M 2 n 3 ) time and O(M n 3 + M 2 ) space. This document is reprinted from the proceedings of the Fifth Eurographics Workshop on Rendering, Darmstadt, Germany, June 13 - 15, 1994 1. Introduction To render realistic images of clouds, one must take into account absorption and multiple scattering of incoming illumination. In addition, to produce the bright edges surrounding a cloud when the sun is behind it, one must account for the anisotropic, mainly forward, scattering of light from the water droplets. In 1984, Jim Kajiya and Brian Von Herzen [Kaj84] proposed two methods for rendering clouds. The first was the two-pass "slab" me...