Spherical billboards and their application to rendering explosions

ABSTRACT

This paper proposes an improved billboard rendering method that splats particles as aligned quadrilaterals similarly to previous techniques, but takes into account the spherical geometry of the particles during fragment processing. The new method can eliminate billboard clipping and popping artifacts of previous techniques, happening when the participating medium contains objects, or the camera flies into the volume. This paper also discusses how to use spherical billboards to render high detail explosions made of fire and smoke at high frame rates.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.3 COMPUTER GRAPHICS
      I.3.7 Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism

Keywords:
billboards, particle systems, shader programming