Example-based synthesis of three-dimensional clouds from photographs

In this paper, we propose a modeling method of clouds from a single photograph. To synthesize realistic images of outdoor scenes, modeling of 3D clouds is necessary. However, synthesizing realistic clouds is still a difficult task. To address this problem, we propose an example-based volume texture synthesis to model nonhomogeneous density volumes. Our method prepares an example cloud volume data using a physically-based fluid simulator. Then the output cloud volume is automatically synthesized from the example cloud volume data so that its rendered image becomes similar to the clouds in the input photograph. In contrast to the previous texture synthesis methods, our method synthesizes density volumes taking into account scattering and transmittance of light. We show several cloud volumes whose rendered images are similar to the input photograph.