Optimisations for Real-Time Volumetric Cloudscapes

Abstract

Volumetric cloudscapes are prohibitively expensive to render in real time without extensive optimisations. Previous approaches render the clouds to an offscreen buffer at one quarter resolution and update a fraction of the pixels per frame, drawing the remaining pixels by temporal reprojection. We present an alternative approach, reducing the number of raymarching steps and adding a randomly jittered offset to the raymarch. We use an analytical integration technique to make results consistent with a lower number of raymarching steps. To remove noise from the resulting image we apply a temporal anti-aliasing implementation. The result is a technique producing visually similar results with 1/16 the number of steps.