Visual simulation of lightning taking into account cloud growth

Author

Sosorbaram, Batjargal ; Fujimoto, Tadahiro ; Muraoka, Kazunobu ; Chiba, Norishige

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. & Inf. Sci., Iwate Univ., Morioka, Japan

fYear

2001

fDate

2001

Firstpage

89

Lastpage

95

Abstract

Simulation of weather scenery in computer graphics (CG) is an important issue that has a wide range of applications related to image content, such as in movies and in various landscape simulations. In general, research to date into CG lightning has focused on generating a lightning pattern by applying probability and statistics techniques, which do not consider the generating mechanism of lightning. In natural lightning, an electrical-discharge path (stepped leader) is generated under the influence of an electric field formed by electrification of a cloud. We present a method that generates a lightning pattern by simulating a stepped leader in an electric field defined by placement of electric charges. We also give rendering methods for lightning in a cloud that are based on the volume rendering method using point light sources

Keywords

lightning; natural scenes; rendering (computer graphics); cloud growth; computer graphics; electric field; electrical-discharge path; image content; landscape simulation; lightning; point light sources; stepped leader; visual simulation; volume rendering method; weather scenery simulation; Application software; Character generation; Clouds; Computational modeling; Computer graphics; Computer simulation; Lightning; Motion pictures; Probability; Statistics;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Computer Graphics International 2001. Proceedings

Conference_Location

Hong Kong

ISSN

1530-1052

Print_ISBN

0-7695-1007-8

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/CGI.2001.934662

Filename

934662