BigDaveDev – Honours

In this final worksheet we are asked to outline our presentation for the 23rd November.  The presentation is to be no more than 5 mins (including question time of 2 mins).  The following are points to talk about:

Introduction:

The focus of this dissertation is on atmospheric scattering as a post-processed effect.  Atmospheric scattering is the reason that our sky has colour.  It describes the way that the light from the sun disperses when it comes through our atmosphere.  In terms of game development, it can add REAL depth cues to vast landscapes and increase the immersion that the player experiences.  Plus, it looks good!

CryEngine2 uses this effect very well and creates astoundingly beautiful environments :

The image on the left is of Kualoa Ranch in Hawaii and the image on the right is the CryEngine2 replica.

In this implementation, though, the aerial perspective calculations used were not those defined by the atmospheric model they used.  Instead, they forced their own implementation to work.  Though it looks good, it is still not as good as it should be.  The aim of this honours project, then, is to use the same atmospheric model as CryEngine2 and to add the correct calculations for aerial perspective.

Issues:

The main issue surrounding this effect is that it is very expensive to calculate.  In the original implementations – see Nishita93 and Preetham99 – highly tessellated sky hemispheres were used.  This meant that for better representations of the sky, more vertices had to be used.  In a game, this would have a serious effect on performance.