Smoke and Shadows: Rendering and Light Interaction of Smoke in Real-Time Rendered Virtual Environments

Realism in computer graphics depends upon digitally representing what we see in the world with careful attention to detail, which usually requires a high degree of complexity in modelling the scene. The inevitable trade-off between realism and performance means that new techniques that aim to improve the visual fidelity of a scene must do so without compromising the real-time rendering performance. We describe and discuss a simple method for realistically casting shadows from an opaque solid object through a GPU (graphics processing unit) based particle system representing natural phenomena, such as smoke.