An interactive rendering system using hierarchical data structure for earth-scale clouds

This paper presents an interactive system for realistic visualization of earth-scale clouds. Realistic images can be generated at interactive frame rates while the viewpoint and the sunlight directions can be changed interactively. The realistic display of earth-scale clouds requires us to render large volume data representing the density distribution of the clouds. However, this is generally time-consuming and it is difficult to achieve the interactive performance, especially when the sunlight direction can be changed. To address this, our system precomputes the integrated intensities and opacities of clouds for various viewing and sunlight directions. This idea is combined with a novel hierarchical data structure for further acceleration. The photorealism of the final image is improved by taking into account the atmospheric effects and shadows of clouds on the earth. We demonstrate the usefulness of our system by an application to a space flight simulation.