Rendering snowing scene on GPU

As the part of natural sceneries, snow scene is a familiar natural phenomenon in the north of China. In this paper, we present a new method to render snow scene on GPU based particle system. We simulate the whirling snowflakes in the sky and the snow deposition effect. Our method processes the birth and death of snow particles via index on CPU and uses a pair of Floating Point Textures on GPU to store the dynamic attributes of snow particles. Our method also updates the dynamic attributes of snow particles, and renders the system on GPU. We also provide a method based height field and establish some deposition rules to simulate the snow deposition. Finally, our experiments prove that our method is feasible and high performance. Our method can be used in computer animation, games, special movie effects, etc.