Chapter Eleven Volume Scattering
So far, we have assumed that scenes are made up of collections of surfaces in a vacuum, which means that radiance is constant along rays between surfaces. However, there are many real-world situations where this assumption is inaccurate: fog and smoke attenuate and scatter light, and scattering from particles in the atmosphere makes the sky blue and sunsets red. This chapter introduces the mathematics to describe how light is affected as it passes through participating media—particles distributed throughout a region of 3D space. Simulating the effect of participating media makes it possible to render images with atmospheric haze, beams of light through clouds, light passing through cloudy water, and subsurface ...
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