Synthesizing High-Resolution Clouds Using 2D and 3D Simulations

Abstract

To create realistic images of outdoor scenes using computer graphics techniques, synthetic clouds with high-resolution details are required. However, the computation cost for generating high-resolution clouds is very expensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we address this problem and propose an efficient method to create high-resolution images of clouds. The method combines low resolution 3D simulation with high resolution 2D simulation. The low resolution 3D simulation is fast and is used for determining the overall shape of the clouds. Then the high resolution 2D simulation uses the result of the 3D simulation and adds small-scale details to them. We demonstrate that our method achieves four to ten times faster computation to generate realistic high-resolution images of clouds.