Cloud simulation and real-time rendering for flight simulation

A cloud illumination model is proposed, in which the relationship between atmosphere density and altitude is taken into consideration, and based on the particle scale the scattering phase function is weighted to improve the simulation accuracy. For static or dynamic cloud rendering in flight simulation, a routing is proposed to model the cloud spectrum based on particle system and texture sprites. The technique of dynamic generation of impostor and simulation on GPU are employed to realize real-time rendering. These techniques are integrated into the scenario system of flight simulation. Experiments show that the reality and immersion of virtual environment are significantly improved with better performance that satisfies the requirements of real-time interactive simulation.