Realistic Atmosphere

A standalone application for rendering procedural planetary images on the GPU.

Can use both realtime and offline raytracing/pathtracing (RT/PT) + raymarching (RM).

Link to the thesis

Features

• Atmospheric scattering (RM)
  • Volumetric light
• Cloud precipitation (RM)
• Procedural terrain (RM, RT/PT for shadows)
  • RM for accelerated soft shadows
• Procedural objects (spheres & cubes) (RT/PT)
  • Only diffuse material
• View from any location (including the space)
• Real physical properties
  • Color correction (Radiance ➡ Luminance)
  • Cloud scattering function
    • Based on real measurements
• Optimizations
  • Light shafts approximation
• Configurable output image size
  • PNG output format
  • Tiled rendering (for lower-end devices)

Implementation

• BGFX framework limited to OpenGL backend
• Raw GLSL used in (mainly compute) shaders
• GLM for algebraic calculations
• SDL for input

Build

Use 64-bit Visual Studio 2022 with MSVC v143 C++ workload and Windows 10 SDK 10.0.19041.0.

Hardware requirements

Tested on GeForce GTX 1050 Mobile and Intel UHD Graphics 630.

Screenshots