Generating and Rendering Procedural Clouds in Real Time on Programmable 3D Graphics Hardware

This paper discusses a process of generating and rendering procedural clouds for 3D environments using programmable 3D graphics hardware. Cloud texture generation is performed using Perlin noise and turbulence functions. Our implementation is done in OpenGL supported GPUs with programmable vertex & fragment processing pipeline that supports OpenGL shading language (GLSL). We have performed a performance benchmark against other existing implementations and found very convincing results, as our approach yields greater FPS than those reported earlier in the literature, as well as our solution is platform independent and portable. The technique can be used in real-time graphics applications, games, film special effects and visual simulations etc