Real-Time Rendering of Light Shafts on GPU

Abstract

In the past, it is difficult to simulate light shafts effect in real-time. One major reason is the high computational expense to perform the physically-accurate computation of atmosphere scattering. Another is due to the limitation of computer resource, especially lack of power and programmability in the graphic hardware. Recently, with the advent of more powerful graphic card in standard PC platform and the development of programmable stages in the graphic pipeline, a lot of computational expensive algorithms are made available in modern commercial games. In this paper, we propose a novel method of rendering light shafts with atmospheric scattering based on actual physical phenomena. The proposed method utilizes hardware frame buffer object and a mesh refinement pattern to achieve photorealistic effect at high frame rate.