Fast rendering of dynamic clouds

We propose an efficient framework for dynamic cloud rendering. Based on the proposed simplified lighting model, the shadow relation table and metaball lighting texture database are constructed in the preprocessing, and features such as self-shadowing and light scattering can be computed quickly using table lookup at the run time. Clouds are rendered using textured billboards and alpha blending, which is further speeded up by incorporating the octree hierarchy and the hierarchical texture caching.