Aesthetically-oriented atmospheric scattering

We present Aesthetically-Oriented Atmospheric Scattering (AOAS): an experiment into the feasibility of using real-time rendering as a tool to explore sky styles. AOAS provides an interactive design environment which enables rapid iteration cycles from concept to implementation to preview. Existing real-time rendering techniques for atmospheric scattering struggle to produce non-photorealistic sky styles within any 3D scene. To solve this problem, first, we simplify the geometric representation of atmospheric scattering to a single skydome to leverage the flexibility and simplicity of skydomes in compositing with 3D scenes. Second, we classify the essential and non-essential visual characteristics of the sky and allow AOAS to vary the latter, thus producing meaningful, non-photorealistic sky styles with real-time atmospheric scattering that are still recognizable as skies, but contain artistic stylization. We use AOAS to generate a wide variety of sky examples ranging from physical to highly stylized in appearance. The algorithm can be easily implemented on the GPU, and performs at interactive frame rates with low memory consumption and CPU usage.