Deep Dynamic Cloud Lighting

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel multi-timescale sky model that synthesizes dynamic cloud movement, significantly enhancing realistic sky illumination in rendering and interactive environments.

Contribution

It presents the first method for dynamic cloud synthesis in sky models, enabling realistic animated cloudy skies by predicting illumination changes over multiple timescales.

Findings

Enables realistic dynamic cloud movement in sky rendering.

Improves scene illumination accuracy under cloudy conditions.

Supports interactive and video applications with moving clouds.

Abstract

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.