Clouds and stars: efficient real-time procedural sky rendering using 3D hardware

Real-time virtual reality applications, including games, increasingly use outdoor environments. A common task in an earth-type environment is to render a sky that is realistic both in terms of imagery and physics. Programmable graphics hardware offers the opportunity to procedurally generate and render a highly realistic sky at a minimal cost. We propose an integrated set of efficient algorithms that run in graphics hardware for interactive sky rendering that is fully parameterized for real-time control. Features of our method include multi-layered dynamic clouds and stars that individually flicker at varying intensity and rate.