Physically Realistic Volume Rendering

Group Members

James Hegarty

Qiqi Wang

Overview

The project we are planning is to render a scene based on physically accurate light scattering model of volume materials. Such material can include fire, smoke, vapor, cloud. Special effects such as rainbows can be also rendered through these models. In order to accurately model the distribution of volume materials in complex geometry, a physically based fluid calculation must be performed in an unstructured mesh. A ray tracing algorithm through unstructured mesh needs to be developed, and light reflection and scattering models from these volume materials needs to be built.

The following pictures are from www.ImageMontage.com , I believe they are taken at the Nevada fall in Yosemite. The water fall and rainbow is the type of things we want to render.

Modeling of volume material distribution

In order to model the distribution of volume materials accurately, we use commercial flow solver Fluent. In the waterfall scene, we calculate the flow of air around the waterfall, from which we calculate the density of water drops in the air. The following pictures demonstrates the geometry, mesh and the velocity field computed by Fluent.