Real-time smoke rendering using compensated ray marching

We present a real-time algorithm called compensated ray marching for rendering of smoke under dynamic low-frequency environment lighting. Our approach is based on a decomposition of the input smoke animation, represented as a sequence of volumetric density fields, into a set of radial basis functions (RBFs) and a sequence of residual fields. To expedite rendering, the source radiance distribution within the smoke is computed from only the lowfrequency RBF approximation of the density fields, since the highfrequency residuals have little impact on global illumination under low-frequency environment lighting. Furthermore, in computing source radiances the contributions from single and multiple scattering are evaluated at only the RBF centers and then approximated at other points in the volume using an RBF-based interpolation. A slice-based integration of these source radiances along each view ray is then performed to render the final image. The high-frequency residual fields, which are ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: TOG
• Authors: Kun Zhou, Zhong Ren, Stephen Lin, Hujun Bao, Baining Guo, Heung-Yeung Shum
• Keywords: Density Fields, Low-frequency Environment, Smoke, TOG 2008