Aesthetically-Oriented Atmospheric Scattering

Yang Shen, Ian Mallett, and Konstantin Shkurko

In Expressive, 2019

Teaser image — **Figure:** Exploring Winnie-the-Pooh with AOAS: the reference image on the top left is the poster for the exhibition "Winnie-the-Pooh: Exploring a Classic" in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston [Mus19]. We might wish to explore the overall feeling for Winnie flying over different sky styles. With AOAS, we are able to intuitively explore different sky styles with an immediate preview - be it a naturally beautiful sky (top second), a yellow sky, subtly turbulent, smiley-shaped, or heart-shaped clouds (top third, top fourth, bottom first), a sunrise (bottom second), or just letting Winnie float in cartoony styles with ambiguous coral or yellow skies (bottom third, bottom fourth).

Abstract

We present Aesthetically-Oriented Atmospheric Scattering (AOAS): an experiment into the feasibility of using real-time rendering as a tool to explore sky styles. AOAS provides an interactive design environment which enables rapid iteration cycles from concept to implementation to preview. Existing real-time rendering techniques for atmospheric scattering struggle to produce non-photorealistic sky styles within any 3D scene. To solve this problem, first, we simplify the geometric representation of atmospheric scattering to a single skydome to leverage the flexibility and simplicity of skydomes in compositing with 3D scenes. Second, we classify the essential and non-essential visual characteristics of the sky and allow AOAS to vary the latter, thus producing meaningful, non-photorealistic sky styles with real-time atmospheric scattering that are still recognizable as skies, but contain artistic stylization. We use AOAS to generate a wide variety of sky examples ranging from physical to highly stylized in appearance. The algorithm can be easily implemented on the GPU, and performs at interactive frame rates with low memory consumption and CPU usage.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{Shen:2019:AOAS,
   title     = {Aesthetically-Oriented Atmospheric Scattering},
   author    = {Shen, Yang and Mallett, Ian and Shkurko, Konstantin},
   booktitle = {ACM/EG Expressive Symposium},
   editor    = {Kaplan, Craig S. and Forbes, Angus and DiVerdi, Stephen},
   year      = {2019},
   pages     = {79-86},
   publisher = {The Eurographics Association},
   ISBN      = {978-3-03868-078-9},
   DOI       = {10.2312/exp.20191079}
}

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to M. Handler, K. Goslar, P. Pizzo, Z. Ren, and A. Stampoulis for encouragement, feedback and advice. We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their feedback. This research is supported by Originate 20% Time.