Variants of a New Volumetric Model for Dust Cloud Representation and Their Comparison to Existing Methods

To date, the techniques used in most real-time graphics applications (e.g. computer games) for modelling and representing dust clouds, centre around the use of flat, pre-drawn sprites, layered onto the screen as ´billboards´. While this can produce an adequate effect, it is not a very realistic representation. This paper presents a new method, based on an octree space-partitioning scheme for fast and memory-efficient storage of volumetric data. This approach differs from the billboards-based methods previously used, in that it attempts to properly represent the three-dimensional volume of the cloud. Two variants are presented, that differ in the algorithm used to construct the volumetric representation. Models visualising the dust cloud created by a fast travelling vehicle, are implemented and compared with the existing real-time methods