Abstract
Realistic outdoor scenarios often include rain and other atmospheric phenomena, which are difficult to simulate in real time. In the field of real-time applications, a number of solutions have been proposed which offer realistic but costly rain systems. Our proposal consists in developing a solution to facilitate the creation and control of rain scenes and to improve on previously used methods while offering a realistic appearance of rain. Firstly, we create and define the areas in which it is raining. Secondly, we perform a suitable management of the particle systems inside them. We include multiresolution techniques in order to adapt the number of particles, their location and their size according to the view conditions. Furthermore, in this work the physical properties of rain are analyzed and its features are incorporated into the final approach that we propose. The presented method is completely integrated in the GPU. We offer a solution which is fast, simple, efficient and easily integrated into existing virtual-reality environments.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Best, A.: The size distribution of raindrops. Q. J. R. Meteorol. Soc. (1950)
Feng, Z.X., Tang, M., Dong, J., Chou, S.C.: Real-time rain simulation. In: CSCWD 2005. LNCS, vol. 3865, pp. 626–635. Springer, Berlin (2006)
Garg, K., Nayar, S.K.: Detection and removal of rain from videos. In: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 01, pp. 528–535 (2004)
Garg, K., Nayar, S.K.: Photorealistic rendering of rain streaks. ACM Trans. Graph. 25(3), 996–1002 (2006)
Gundersen, O.E., Tangvald, L.: Level of detail for physically based fire. In: Theory and Practice of Computer Graphics, pp. 213–220 (2007)
Hallenbeck, C.: Summer types of rainfall in upper pecos valley. Mon. Weather Rev. 209–216 (1917)
Iwasaki, K., Dobashi, Y., Yoshimoto, F., Nishita, T.: Gpu-based rendering of point-sampled water surfaces. Vis. Comput. 24(2), 77–84 (2008)
Kaneda, K., Ikeda, S., Yamashita, H.: Animation of water droplets moving down a surface. J. Vis. Comput. Animat. 10(1), 15–26 (1999)
Kelkar, V.N.: Size of raindrops. Proc. Indian Acad. Sci. Sect. A 22, 394–399 (1945)
Kusamoto, K., Tadamura, K., Tabuchi, Y.: A method for rendering realistic rainfall animation with motion of view. IPSJ SIG Not. 2001(106), 21–26 (2001)
Luebke, D., Reddy, M., Cohen, J., Varshney, A., Watson, B., Huebner, R.: Level of Detail for 3D Graphics. Morgan-Kaufmann, San Mateo (2003)
Marshall, J.S., Palmer, W.M.: The distribution of raindrops with size. J. Meteorol. (1948)
McComber, P.: Sensitivity of selected freezing rain models to meteorological data. In: Proc. of the 57th Annual Eastern Snow Conference (2000)
O’Brien, D., Fisher, S., Lin, M.: Automatic simplification of particle system dynamics. In: Proceedings of the Fourteenth Conference on Computer Animation, pp. 210–257 (2001)
Puppo, E., Scopigno, R.: Simplification, LOD and multiresolution—principles and applications. In: Eurographics ’97 Tutorial Notes (1997)
Rasmussen, R.M.: A review of theoretical and observational studies in cloud and precipitation physics. Rev. Geophys. Suppl. 33 (1995)
Ross, O.N.: Optical remote sensing of rainfall micro-structures. Tech. rep., Freien Universität Berlin. Diplomarbeit thesis (2000)
Rousseau, P., Jolivet, V., Ghazanfarpour, D.: Realistic real-time rain rendering. Comput. Graph. 30(4), 507–518 (2006). Special issue on Natural Phenomena Simulation
Stanik, S., Werman, M.: Simulation of rain in videos. Int. J. Comput. Vis. Texture 2003, 95–100 (2003)
Stefano Soatto Gianfranco Doretto, Y.N.W.: Dynamic textures. In: International Conference on Computer Vision, pp. 439–446 (2001)
Straube, J., Burnett, E.F.P.: Simplified prediction of driving rain on buildings. In: Proceedings of International Physics Conference, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, pp. 375–382 (2000)
Tariq, S.: Rain. nvidia whitepaper. http://developer.download.nvidia.com/SDK/10/direct3d/Source/rain/doc/RainSDKWhitePaper.pdf (2007)
Tatarchuk, N.: Artist-directable real-time rain rendering in city environments. In: SIGGRAPH ’06: ACM SIGGRAPH 2006 Courses, pp. 23–64 (2006)
Wang, H., Mucha, P.J., Turk, G.: Water drops on surfaces. ACM Trans. Graph. 24(3), 921–929 (2005)
Wang, L., Lin, Z., Fang, T., Yang, X., Yu, X., Kang, S.B.: Real-time rendering of realistic rain. In: SIGGRAPH ’06: ACM SIGGRAPH 2006 Sketches, p. 156 (2006)
Wang, N., Wade, B.: Rendering falling rain and snow. In: SIGGRAPH ’04: ACM SIGGRAPH 2004 Sketches, p. 14. ACM, New York (2004)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Electronic Supplementary Material
Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Puig-Centelles, A., Ripolles, O. & Chover, M. Creation and control of rain in virtual environments. Vis Comput 25, 1037–1052 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-009-0366-9
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-009-0366-9