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Real-time accumulation of occlusion-based snow

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Abstract

This paper describes a technique to allow the real-time simulation of snowfall accumulation in a dynamic 3D environment. The implementation maps surface-bound accumulation buffers to each object in the scene, forming height-maps of accumulated snow cover. The environment is rendered from above similar to the way shadow mapping is typically produced. However, unique buffer IDs and texture co-ordinates are output within each pixel of the render. A new technique for performing the mapping between buffers is proposed where a series of quads are rendered, one per pixel of the occlusion projection, to map directly visible surfaces to their corresponding accumulation height-map. Blurring is performed on the maps and per-pixel detail is given by procedurally generated normal maps of each surface updated frame by frame. Additional detail and shaping is performed using view-dependent tessellation and the snow surface is created by re-colouring and offsetting the existing scene geometry. This is the first implementation of snow simulation which allows persistent accumulation on a dynamic, moving scene in real-time.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of East Anglia, Norwich Research Park, Norwich, NR4 7TJ, UK

    D. T. Reynolds, S. D. Laycock & A. M. Day

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  1. D. T. Reynolds
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  2. S. D. Laycock
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  3. A. M. Day
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Correspondence to D. T. Reynolds.

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Reynolds, D.T., Laycock, S.D. & Day, A.M. Real-time accumulation of occlusion-based snow. Vis Comput 31, 689–700 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-014-0995-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-014-0995-5

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