Phenomenological Transparency

IEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph. 2017 May;23(5):1465-1478. doi: 10.1109/TVCG.2017.2656082. Epub 2017 Jan 20.

Abstract

Translucent objects such as fog, clouds, smoke, glass, ice, and liquids are pervasive in cinematic environments because they frame scenes in depth and create visually-compelling shots. Unfortunately, they are hard to render in real-time and have thus previously been rendered poorly compared to opaque surfaces. This paper introduces the first model for a real-time rasterization algorithm that can simultaneously approximate the following transparency phenomena: wavelength-varying ("colored") transmission, translucent colored shadows, caustics, volumetric light and shadowing, partial coverage, diffusion, and refraction. All render efficiently with order-independent draw calls and low bandwidth. We include source code.