Interactive physically-based cloud simulation

Abstract

Clouds play an important role in the depiction of many natural outdoor scenes. Realistic modeling and rendering of such scenes is important for applications in games, military training simulations, flight simulations, and even in the creation of digital artistic media. Previous methods for modeling the growth of clouds do not account for the fluid interactions that are responsible for cloud formation in the physical atmosphere. We propose a model for simulating cloud formation based on a basic computational fluid solver. This allows us to simulate the complex air motion that contributes to cloud formation in our atmosphere. Among the natural processes that we simulate are buoyancy, relative humidity, and condensation. Because we have built this model on top of a visually realistic fluid simulator with which the user is able to interact, we are also able to give the user artistic control over a physically accurate environment. In practice, the user need only set the initial conditions for our virtual atmosphere to produce different types of cloud formations.