Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

A survey on participating media rendering techniques

  • original article
  • Published:
The Visual Computer Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Rendering participating media is important for a number of domains, ranging from commercial applications (entertainment, virtual reality) to simulation systems (driving, flying, and space simulators) and safety analyses (driving conditions, sign visibility). This article surveys global illumination algorithms for environments including participating media. It reviews both appearance-based and physically-based media methods, including the single-scattering and the more general multiple-scattering techniques. The objective of the survey is the characterization of all these methods: identification of their base techniques, assumptions, limitations, and range of utilization. It concludes with some reflections about the suitability of the methods depending on the specific application involved, and possible future research lines.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Adabala N, Manohar S (2000) Modeling and rendering of gaseous phenomena using particle maps. J Visual Comput Anim 11(5):279–294

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Akeley K, Hanrahan P (2001) Real time graphics architectures. Technical report, University of Stanford. Course CS448A Notes, Fall 2001. http://graphics-stanford.edu/courses/cs448a-01-fall

  3. Akenine-Moller T, Haines E (2002) Practical parallel rendering. AK Peters, Wellesley

  4. Akenine-Moller T, Haines E (2003) Real-time rendering. AK Peters, Wellesley

  5. Arquès D, Michelin S (1996) Proximity radiosity: exploiting coherence to accelerate form factor computations. In: Rendering Techniques ’96, Proceedings of the Seventh Eurographics Workshop on Rendering. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg New York, pp 143–152

  6. Bhate N (1993) Application of rapid hierarchical radiosity to participating media. In: Proceedings of ATARV-93: Advanced Techniques in Animation, Rendering, and Visualization, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey, pp 43–53

  7. Bhate N, Tokuta A (1992) Photorealistic volume rendering of media with directional scattering. In: Proceedings of the Third Eurographics Workshop on Rendering, Bristol, UK, pp 227–245

  8. Biri V, Michelin S, Arquès D (2002) Real-time animation of realistic fog. In: Rendering Techniques 2002, Proceedings of the Thirteenth Eurographics Workshop on Rendering. ACM, Boston, Poster sessions pp 9–16

  9. Blasi P, Le Saëc B, Schlick C (1993) A rendering algorithm for discrete volume density objects. In: Proceedings of the Computer Graphics Forum (Eurographics ’93) 12(3):C201–C210

  10. Blasi P, Le Saëc B, Schlick C (1994) An importance driven Monte-Carlo solution to the global illumination problem. In: Proceedings of the Fifth Eurographics Workshop on Rendering, Darmstadt, Germany, pp 173–183

  11. Blinn JF (1982) Light reflection functions for simulation of clouds and dusty surfaces. In: Computer Graphics (ACM SIGGRAPH ’82 Proceedings) 16(3):21–29

  12. Bohren CF (1987) Multiple scattering of light and some of its observable consequences. Am J Phys 55(6):524–533

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Bohren CF, Huffman DR (1993) Absorption and scattering of light by small particles. Wiley, New York

  14. Cerezo E, Serón FJ (2002) Rendering natural water: Merging computer graphics with physics and biology. In: Vince J and Earnshaw R (eds) Advances in modelling, animation and rendering, Proceedings of the Computer Graphics International 2002. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg New York

  15. Chandrasekhar S (1960) Radiative tranfer. Dover, New York

  16. Christensen PH (1995) Hierarchical techniques for glossy global illumination. PhD Dissertation, University of Washington

  17. Devlin K, Chalmers A, Wilkie A, Purgathofer W (2002) Tone reproduction and physically based spectral rendering. In: Proceedings of the Eurographics 2002 State of the Art Reports, Saarbrücken (Germany), 2–6 September

  18. Dobashi Y, Kaneda K, Yamashita H, Okita T, Nishita T (2000) A simple, efficient method for realistic animation of clouds. In: Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2000, pp 19–28

  19. Dobashi Y, Yamamoto T, Nishita T (2002) Interactive rendering of atmospheric scattering effects using graphics hardware. In: Spencer SN (ed) Proceedings of the 17th Eurographics/SIGGRAPH workshop on graphics hardware (EGGH-02). ACM, Boston, pp 99–108

  20. Dumont E (1998) Semi-monte carlo light tracing applied to the study of road visibility in fog. In: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Monte Carlo and Quasi Monte Carlo Methods in Scientific Computing, Lecture Notes in Computational Science and Engineering, Berlin, Germany. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg New York

  21. Dutré P, Lafortune E, Willems YD (1993) Monte Carlo light tracing with direct pixel contributions. In: Proceedings of Third International Conference on Computational Graphics and Visualization Techniques (Compugraphics ’93), Alvor, Portugal, pp 128–137

  22. Ebert DS, Parent RE (1990) Rendering and animation of gaseous phenomena by combining fast volume and scanline a-buffer techniques. In: Computer Graphics (ACM SIGGRAPH ’90 Proceedings) 24:357–366

  23. Fedkiw R, Stam J, Jensen HW (2001) Visual simulation of smoke. In: Computer Graphics Proceedings, Annual Conference Series (SIGGRAPH 2001), pp 15–22

  24. Foster I (1995) Designing and building parallel programs: Concepts and tools for parallel software engineering. Addison-Wesley, Boston

    Google Scholar 

  25. Gardner GY (1985) Visual simulation of clouds. In: Computer Graphics (ACM SIGGRAPH ’85 Proceedings) 19(3):297–303

  26. Geist R, Rasche K, Westall J, Schalkoff R (2004) Lattice-boltzmann lighting. In: Eurographics Symposium on Rendering, Norrköping, Sweden, pp 355–362

  27. Glassner AS (1995) Principles of digital image synthesis. Kaufmann, San Francisco

  28. Hanrahan P, Krueger W (1993) Reflection from layered surfaces due to subsurface scattering. In: Computer Graphics Proceedings, Annual Conference Series, 1993 (ACM SIGGRAPH ’93 Proceedings), pp 165–174

  29. Hanrahan P, Salzman D, Aupperle L (1991) A rapid hierarchical radiosity algorithm. In: Computer Graphics (ACM SIGGRAPH ’91 Proceedings) 25:197–206

  30. Harris MJ, Lastra A (2001) Real-time cloud rendering. In: Computer Graphics Forum (Proceedings of Eurographics 2001) 20:76–84

  31. Harris MJ, Lastra A (2002) Real-time cloud rendering for games. In: Proceedings of Game Developers Conference 2002

  32. Van der Hulst HC (1981) Light scattering by small particles. Dover, New York

  33. Inakage M (1989) An illumination model for atmospheric environments. In: Earnshaw RA, Wyvill B (eds) New advances in computer graphics. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg New York, pp 533–548

  34. Irwin J (1996) Full-spectral rendering of the earth’s atmosphere using a physical model of Rayleigh scattering. In: Proceedings of the 1996 Eurographics UK Conference, pp 103–115

  35. Jackèl D, Walter B (1997) Modeling and rendering of the atmosphere using Mie-scattering. Comput Graph Forum 16(4):201–210

    Article  Google Scholar 

  36. Jensen HW (1996) Global illumination using photon maps. In: Rendering Techniques ’96 (Proceedings of the Seventh Eurographics Workshop on Rendering), New York. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg New York, pp 21–30

  37. Jensen HW, Christensen PH (1998) Efficient simulation of light transport in scenes with participating media using photon maps. In: Computer Graphics (ACM SIGGRAPH ’98 Proceedings), pp 311–320

  38. Jensen HW, Durand F, Stark M, Premoze S, Dorsey J, Shirley P (2001) A physically-based night sky model. In: Computer Graphics Proceedings, Annual Conference Series (Proc. SIGGRAPH ’01), pp 399–408

  39. Jensen HW, Legakis J, Dorsey J (1999) Rendering of wet materials. In: Lischinski D, Larson GW (eds) Rendering techniques ’99 (Proceedings of the Tenth Eurographics Workshop on Rendering), New York. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg New York, pp 273–282

  40. Jensen HW, Marschner S, Levoy M, Hanrahan P (2001) A practical model for subsurface light transport. In: Computer Graphics Proceedings, Annual Conference Series (SIGGRAPH ’01), pp 511–518

  41. Kajiya JT, Herzen BPV (1984) Ray tracing volume densities. In: Computer Graphics (ACM SIGGRAPH ’84 Proceedings) 18:165–174

  42. Kaneda K, Okamoto T, Nakamae E, Nishita T (1991) Photorealistic image synthesis for outdoor scenery under various atmospheric conditions. Visual Comput 7(5):247–258

    Article  Google Scholar 

  43. Kato T, Saito J (2002) The kilauea parallel global illumination renderer. In: Rendering Techniques ’96 (Proceedings of the Fourth Eurographics Workshop on Parallel Graphics and Visualization), New York. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg New York, pp 7–16

  44. Klassen RV (1987) Modeling the effect of atmosphere on light. ACM Trans Graph 6(3):215–237

    Article  Google Scholar 

  45. Kniss J, Premoze S, Hansen C, Shirley P, McPherson A (2003) A model for volume lighting and modeling. IEEE Trans Visual Comput Graph 9(2):150–162

    Article  Google Scholar 

  46. Lafortune EP, Willems YD (1996) Rendering participating media with bidirectional path tracing. In: Rendering Techniques ’96 (Proceedings of the Seventh Eurographics Workshop on Rendering), New York. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg New York, pp 91–100

  47. Lange T, Pietrek G (1998) Rendering participating media using the photon map. Technical report 678/1998, Fachbereich Informatik, Universität Dortmund

  48. Languénou E (1994) Radiosité hiérarchique et transfer radiatif dans les milieux semi-transparents. Dissertation, Université de Rennes. Available (in French) from http://www.sciences.univ-nantes.fr/info/perso/permanents/languenou/renderWork.html

  49. Languénou E, Bouatouch K, Chelle M (1994) Global illumination in presence of participating media with general properties. In: Fifth Eurographics Workshop on Rendering, Darmstadt, Germany, pp 69–85

  50. Lathrop KD (1968) Ray effects in discrete ordinates equations. Nucl Sci Eng 32:357–369

    Article  Google Scholar 

  51. Lecocq P, Michelin S, Arquès D, Kemeny A (2000) Simulation d’éclairage en présence de milieux participatifs: vers une solution temps-réel. In: AFIG ’00 (Actes des 13ièmes journées de l’AFIG)

  52. Lecocq P, Michelin S, Kemeny A, Arquès D (2002) Real time lighting simulation in presence of fog: applications for driving simulation. In: Proceedings of the Driving Simulation Conference 2002, Paris, France

  53. Levoy M (1988) Display of surfaces from volume data. IEEE Comput Graph Appl 8(3):29–37

    Article  Google Scholar 

  54. Max NL (1986) Atmospheric illumination and shadows. In: Computer Graphics (ACM SIGGRAPH ’86 Proceedings) 20:117–124

  55. Max NL (1994) Efficient light propagation for multiple anisotropic volume scattering. In: Fifth Eurographics Workshop on Rendering, Darmstadt, Germany, pp 87–104

  56. Max NL (1995) Optical models for direct volume rendering. IEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph 1(2):99–108

    Article  Google Scholar 

  57. Metropolis NC, Rosenbluth AW, Rosenbluth MN, Teller AH, Teller E (1953) Equation of state calculations by fast computing machines. J Chem Phys 21:1087–1092

    Article  Google Scholar 

  58. Nguyen DQ, Fedkiw RP, Jensen HW (2002) Physically based modeling and animation of fire. ACM Trans Graph 21(3):721–728

    Article  Google Scholar 

  59. Nishita T, Dobashi Y, Kaneda K, Yamashita H (1996) Display method of the sky color taking into account multiple scattering. In: Proceedings of the Fourth Pacific Conference on Computer Graphics and Applications (Pacific Graphics ’96), pp 66–79

  60. Nishita T, Dobashi Y, Nakamae E (1996) Display of clouds taking into account multiple anisotropic scattering and sky light. In: Computer Graphics Proceedings, Annual Conference Series, 1996 (ACM SIGGRAPH ’96 Proceedings), pp 379–386

  61. Nishita T, Iwasaki H, Dobashi Y, Nakamae E (1997) A modeling and rendering method for snow by using metaballs. In: Computer Graphics Forum (Eurographics ’97 Proceedings) 16(3):357–364

  62. Nishita T, Miyawaki Y, Nakamae E (1987) A shading model for atmospheric scattering considering luminous intensity distribution of light sources. In: Computer Graphics (ACM SIGGRAPH ’87 Proceedings) 21:303–310

  63. Nishita T, Nakamae E (1994) Method of displaying optical effects within water using accumulation buffer. In: Computer Graphics Proceedings, Annual Conference Series, 1994 (ACM SIGGRAPH ’94 Proceedings), pp 373–380

  64. Nishita T, Sirai T, Tadamura K, Nakamae E (1993) Display of the earth taking into account atmospheric scattering. In: Computer Graphics Proceedings, Annual Conference Series, 1993 (ACM SIGGRAPH ’93 Proceedings), pp 175–182

  65. Patmore C (1993) Simulated multiple scattering for cloud rendering. In: Mudur SP, Pattanaik SN (eds) Graphics, Design and Visualization (IFIP Transactions B-9), Amsterdam, The Netherlands, pp 59–70

  66. Pattanaik SN, Mudur SP (1993) Computation of global illumination in a participating medium by Monte Carlo simulation. J Visual Comput Anim 4(3):133–152

    Article  Google Scholar 

  67. Pauly M, Kollig T, Keller A (2000) Metropolis light transport for participating media. In: Peroche B, Rushmeier H (eds) Rendering techniques 2000 (Proceedings of the Eleventh Eurographics Workshop on Rendering), New York. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg New York, pp 11–22

  68. Pérez F, Martín I, Pueyo X (2002) High quality final gathering for hierarchical Monte Carlo radiosity for general environments. In: Vince J, Earnshaw R (eds) Advances in modelling, animation and rendering (Proc. of Computer Graphics International 2002). Springer, Berlin Heidelberg New York, pp 425–437

  69. Pérez F, Martín I, Sillion FX, Pueyo X (2000) Acceleration of monte carlo path tracing in general environments. In: Proceedings of Pacific Graphics 2000, Hong Kong, PRC, pp 71–77

  70. Pérez F, Pueyo X, Sillion FX (1997) Global illumination techniques for the simulation of participating media. In: Dorsey J and Slusallek P (eds) Rendering Techniques ’97 (Proceedings of the Eighth Eurographics Workshop on Rendering), New York. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg New York, pp 309–320

  71. Perlin K (1985) An image synthesizer. In: Computer Graphics (ACM SIGGRAPH ’85 Proceedings) 19(3):287–296

  72. Preetham AJ, Shirley P, Smits BE (1999) A practical analytic model for daylight. In: Computer Graphics Proceedings, Annual Conference Series (Proc. SIGGRAPH ’99), pp 91–100

  73. Premoze S, Ashikhmin M (2001) Rendering natural waters. In: Computer Graphics Forum 20(4):189–200

  74. Premoze S, Ashikhmin M, Shirley P (2003) Path integration for light transport in volumes. In: Proceedings of Eurographics Symposium on Rendering, pp 52–63

  75. Premoze S, Ashikhmin M, Tessendorf J, Ramamoorthi R, Nayar S (2004) Practical rendering of multiple scattering effects in participating media. In: Eurographics Symposium on Rendering, Norrköping, Sweden, pp 363–373

  76. Riley K, Ebert D, Kraus M, Tessendorf J, Hansen C (2004) Efficient rendering of atmospheric phenomena. In: Eurographics Symposium on Rendering, Norrköping, Sweden, pp 375–386

  77. Roysam B, Cohen A, Getto P, Boyce P (1993) A numerical approach to the computation of light propagation through turbid media: application to the evaluation of lighted exit signs. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Industry Applications, Detroit, Michigan, pp 661–669

  78. Rushmeier HE (1988) Realistic image synthesis for scenes with radiatively participating media. PhD Dissertation, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

  79. Rushmeier HE (1994) Rendering participating media: problems and solutions from application areas. In: Fifth Eurographics Workshop on Rendering, Darmstadt, Germany, pp 35–56

  80. Rushmeier HE, Torrance KE (1987) The zonal method for calculating light intensities in the presence of a participating medium. In: Computer Graphics (ACM SIGGRAPH ’87 Proceedings) 21:293–302

  81. Sakas G (1990) Fast rendering of arbitrary distributed volume densities. In: Vandoni CE and Duce DA (eds) Proceedings of Eurographics ’90, Amsterdam, Netherlands, pp 519–530

  82. Sakas G (1993) Modeling and animating turbulent gaseous phenomena using spectral synthesis. Vis Comput 9(4):200–212

    Article  Google Scholar 

  83. Sakas G, Gerth M (1991) Sampling and anti-aliasing of discrete 3-D volume density textures. In: Proceedings of Eurographics ’91, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Elsevier, Amsterdam

  84. Sakas G, Hartig J (1992) Interactive visualization of large scalar voxel fields. In Kaufman A, Nielson GM (eds) Proceedings Visualization ’92, Boston, Massachusetts

  85. Schaufler G (1995) Dynamically generated impostors. In: Proceedings of GI Workshop on Modeling, Virtual Worlds, Distributed Graphics, Bonn, Germany, pp 129–139

  86. Siegel R, Howell JR (1992) Thermal radiation heat transfer, 3rd edn. Hemisphere, New York

  87. Sillion F (1995) A unified hierarchical algorithm for global illumination with scattering volumes and object clusters. IEEE Trans Visual Comput Graph 1(3):240–254

    Article  Google Scholar 

  88. Sillion F, Drettakis G, Soler C (1995) A clustering algorithm for radiance calculation in general environments. In: Hanrahan PM, Purgathofer W (eds) Rendering Techniques ’95 (Proceedings of the Sixth Eurographics Workshop on Rendering), New York. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg New York, pp 196–205

  89. Sillion F, Puech C (1994) Radiosity and global illumination. Kaufmann, San Francisco

  90. Smits B, Arvo J, Greenberg D (1994) A clustering algorithm for radiosity in complex environments. In: Computer Graphics Proceedings, Annual Conference Series, 1994 (ACM SIGGRAPH ’94 Proceedings), pp 435–442

  91. Sobierajski LM (1994) Global illumination models for volume rendering. PhD Dissertation, State University New York

  92. Stam J (1994) Stochastic rendering of density fields. In: Proceedings of Graphics Interface ’94. Kaufmann, San Francisco, pp 51–58

  93. Stam J (1995) Multi-scale stochastic modelling of complex natural phenomena. Dissertation, University of Toronto

  94. Stam J (1995) Multiple scattering as a diffusion process. In: Hanrahan PM, Purgathofer W (eds) Rendering Techniques ’95 (Proceedings of the Sixth Eurographics Workshop on Rendering), New York. Springer-Verlag, Berlin Heidelberg New York, pp 41–50

  95. Stam J, Fiume E (1993) Turbulent wind fields for gaseous phenomena. In: Computer Graphics Proceedings, Annual Conference Series, 1993 (ACM SIGGRAPH ’93 Proceedings), pp 369–376

  96. Stam J, Fiume E (1995) Depicting fire and other gaseous phenomena using diffusion processes. In: Computer Graphics Proceedings, Annual Conference Series, 1995 (ACM SIGGRAPH ’95 Proceedings), pp 129–136

  97. Purcell WMT, Buck I, Hanrahan P (2002)Ray tracing on programmable graphics hardware. ACM Trans Graph 21(3):703–712

    Article  Google Scholar 

  98. Tadamura K, Nakamae E, Kaneda K, Baba M, Yamashita H, Nishita T (1993) Modeling of skylight and rendering of outdoor scenes. In: Computer Graphics Forum (Eurographics ’93), Barcelona, Spain 12:C189–C200

  99. Uhl F, Blanc-Talon J (1997) Rendering explosions. In: Proceedings of SMC 97, Simulation, Government and Aerospace Simulation 29(4):427–440

  100. Veach E, Guibas LJ (1995) Optimally combining sampling techniques for Monte Carlo rendering. In: Computer Graphics Proceedings, Annual Conference Series, 1995 (ACM SIGGRAPH ’95 Proceedings), pp 419–428

  101. Veach E, Guibas LJ (1997) Metropolis light transport. In: Computer Graphics (ACM SIGGRAPH ’97 Proceedings) 31:65–76

  102. Wald I, Purcell TJ, Schmittler J, Benthin C, Slusallek P (2003) Realtime ray tracing and its use for interactive global illumination. Eurographics State of the Art Reports, Granada (Spain), 1–6 September

  103. Watt M (1999) Light-water interaction using backward beam tracing. Comput Graph 24(4):377–385

    Article  Google Scholar 

  104. Westover L (1990) Footprint evaluation for volume rendering. Comput Graph 24(4):367–376

    Article  Google Scholar 

  105. Wilkie A, Tobler R, Ulbricht C, Zotti G, Purgathofer W (2004) An analytical model for skylight polarisation. In: Eurographics Symposium on Rendering, Norrköping, Sweden, pp 387–399

  106. Willis PJ (1987) Visual simulation of atmospheric haze. Comput Graph Forum 6:35–42

    Article  Google Scholar 

  107. Yaeger L, Upson C, Myers R (1986) Combining physical and visual simulation – creation of the planet Jupiter for the film 2010. In: Computer Graphics (ACM SIGGRAPH ’86 Proceedings) 20(4):85–93

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Advanced Computer Graphics Group (GIGA), Computer Science Department, University of Zaragoza, Spain

    Eva Cerezo & Francisco J. Seron

  2. Girona Graphics Group (GGG), Computer Science Department, University of Girona, Spain

    Frederic Pérez & Xavier Pueyo

  3. ARTIS-GRAVIR Laboratory, INRIA, France

    François X. Sillion

Authors
  1. Eva Cerezo
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Frederic Pérez
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Xavier Pueyo
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Francisco J. Seron
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. François X. Sillion
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Francisco J. Seron.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Cerezo, E., Pérez, F., Pueyo, X. et al. A survey on participating media rendering techniques. Vis Comput 21, 303–328 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-005-0287-1

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-005-0287-1

Keywords

Search

Navigation