Real-time Rendering of Dynamic Baked Clouds

Sammanfattning

Realistic cloud rendering is pivotal for authentic outdoor environments, particularly in immersive applications like video games. In recent years, volumetric ray marching has become the gold standard for cloud rendering in video games, but it comes with a great performance cost to achieve the level of detail that is expected in modern games. In this thesis, two volumetric cloud renderers have been implemented and evaluated comparatively in terms of performance and visual quality -- one using traditional ray marching, and another which pre-computes the lighting to reduce the performance cost of rendering each frame. In each version, a collection of state-of-the-art cloud rendering techniques was implemented to evaluate both versions accurately and realistically. The evaluation shows a significant performance improvement across all tests, with minimal changes in visual quality, at the cost of more memory usage and occasional visual artifacts. These artifacts were, however, completely absent when rendering at higher quality.