GPU Ray Marching for Real-Time Rendering of Participating Media

Abstract

This paper presents a GPU based ray marching algorithm for real-time rendering of participating media. We fire a ray at each pixel being shaded on the cube surface, and then we find an intersection between the ray and inner-volume recorded by a 3D texture, using both linear and binary searches. At this intersection, the ray marches through the volume to compute radiance by single scattering of light. This technique can render isotropic as well as anisotropic participating media at tens frames per second on graphics hardware without any preprocessing loads.