Optimized Construction and Rendering of Natural Light Shaft Volumes through Depth Map

In this paper, an efficient method is proposed for constructing and simulating dynamic natural light shaft volumes with atmospheric scattering.First, to represent the obstructed light shafts, the shadow volumes are considered as special light shaft volumes.Then the information in depth map is used to eliminate the complex overlapping between shadow volumes so that the fill-rate consumption of rasterization is reduced.We preprocess some construction steps of light shafts and the remainder are implemented in GPU kernel.The scattering process is efficiently computed on GPU.This algorithm can afford realistic simulation of complex scene with dynamic light source in real-time.We also simulate the visible dust floating in the air due to scattering to enhance the reality.Experimental results showed that the proposed algorithm offers an efficient solution to the occlusion and shadow problem and simulates the combined effect of natural light and shadow in real time.