Real-Time Modeling and Rendering of 3D Cloud and Its Application in Industrial Simulations

We put forward a physical simulation based method for cloud modeling which is artistically controllable.The cloud formation，dissipation and motion are modeled by physical equations of fluid flow， the Navier-Stokes equations，and the shape of cloud is generated by box accumulation，and finally3D cloud model is generated through particles filling up.To meet the needs of rea-l time rendering，the Navier-Stokes equations are solved on GPU，in taking advantages of its parallelism.Regarding to the cloud rendering，a simple cloud lighting model is applied with illumination of sun shine and weather condition.In addition，we utilize the loop impostor technology to improve the rendering speed and solve the problem of applying impostor technology to alpha blended scene by GPU programming.We developed a3D cloud simulation system by means of graphics API according to the method described in the paper.The system has been applied to various industrial simulation projects and achieved good results.The clouds generated by the method are realistic.