Physically based volumic rendering
The idea is to render a scene based on physically accurate light emmition, reflection and scattering model of volumic materials. such material can include fire, smoke, vapor, cloud. Special effects such as rainbows can be also rendered through these models.
The following are some pictures from internet. These effects are what we are aiming through this technology.
The spacial distribution of materials such as smoke and fire can be obtained by solving flow equations using commercial software such as Fluent or research software such as CDP. The output can be exported as a ASCII tecplot file, which can be easily read. The main question of the project is, given the spatial distribution of volumic material such as smoke, how to render to light reflection and scattering from the volumic material?
For the rendering competetion, one idea is to render a scene with killeroos ( or anything you want ) that is burning and emitting lots of smoke that all around on the scene. Please contact Qiqi Wang (qiqi@stanford.edu) if interested.