Deep Dynamic Cloud Lighting
This addresses the need for realistic cloudy sky lighting in video or interactive environments, where previous methods neglected cloud movement, making it an incremental improvement over static approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of simulating dynamic cloud movement in sky illumination for rendering, proposing a multi-timescale model that enables whole-sky dynamic cloud synthesis for the first time.
Sky illumination is a core source of lighting in rendering, and a substantial amount of work has been developed to simulate lighting from clear skies. However, in reality, clouds substantially alter the appearance of the sky and subsequently change the scene's illumination. While there have been recent advances in developing sky models which include clouds, these all neglect cloud movement which is a crucial component of cloudy sky appearance. In any sort of video or interactive environment, it can be expected that clouds will move, sometimes quite substantially in a short period of time. Our work proposes a solution to this which enables whole-sky dynamic cloud synthesis for the first time. We achieve this by proposing a multi-timescale sky appearance model which learns to predict the sky illumination over various timescales, and can be used to add dynamism to previous static, cloudy sky lighting approaches.