Real-time rendering of natural light shafts for indoor and outdoor scenes

This paper presents an efficient method of simulating natural light shafts with atmospheric scattering based on physical models. An analytic formula of light shaft is derived and a uniform representation of shaft volume accounting for both light shafts and shadow shafts is proposed which can take advantage of the current graphic hardware to accelerate the scattering computation. Our approach is capable of simulating the lighting shaft effect of multiple parallel light sources and producing realistic lighting effect with high frame rate for real time applications.EI0121580-15861