Modeling and Rendering Snowy Natural Scenery

Realistic image synthesis of high complex natural scenes has been always a challenging topic in computer graphics. Generation of snow scenes could be even more difficult due to the inconvenience of using common modeling elements, such as polygons and curved surfaces, to express the snow shape. This paper introduces an approximate method to solve the problem. By the method, displacement map is used to model snow block on near objects, constructed from polygons, while volumetric texture map is introduced to handle the objects in distance like trees. Test result shows that the method is viable in producing realistic snow scenes with comprehensive object environments, in a favorable requirement of storage and rendering computation.