I saw this a while ago so it might not be totally related, but Sebastian Lague did a video on atmospheres for his planet generation experiment which was also very entertaining to watch [1].
There's something particularly entertaining on developing visuals and watching them come a reality — I hope at some point be able to experiment in this field.
For me the most amazing thing about Sebastian Lague is how the youtube algorithm can screw you up. He used to do millions of view on his videos, and now he barely makes half a million. Well it might also be because of covid, and everyone at home getting interesting in random stuff.
Incredible what mobile phones and browsers can do nowadays. I remember implementing this paper from 1993 (the absolutely OG for this topic and very readable): “Display of The Earth Taking into Account Atmospheric Scattering” by Nishita et al: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2933032_Display_of_...
I've thought before about trying to render skies on the web as a series of gradients overlaid on top of one another. I expect I could have had some level of success and gotten some mediocre results, but it would be nothing compared to what you've created.
Thank you so much for sharing this; it's inspirational, must have taken you a very long time to put together, and I'm blown away by your results.
I implemented Rayleigh and Mie scattering for a game engine once (my own, hobbyist thing). It was pretty crazy to see a quite good sunset/sunrise cycle from those alone. IIRC even the sun itself popped out of that somehow.
I was using XNA (Microsoft's C# gamedev platform) and following Riemer's excellent series of tutorials, which have been preserved here[0], but I don't see anything about scattering. I might have gotten that bit from somewhere else. I do recall reading papers with math equations.
Scattering has long been key to making realistic looking rendered images. One of my favorite papers: http://www.graphics.stanford.edu/papers/bssrdf/bssrdf.pdf
which I think is the first time I learned that rendering milk is a tricky problem.
It's fantastic software that's been around for many years, and has exquisite attention to detail on this and many other topics; this article also reminded me of it!
This is hugely relevant to my interests. In my spare time I've been building a planetarium/star map app (iOS / Vision Pro) and atmospheric scattering is something that has been on my todo list for awhile. This is definitely above and beyond what I'm going for atmosphere-wise but still amazing to see. Thanks to Maxime for this write up!
I wonder how this relates to the Perez All-Weather and Preetham sky models. Not an expert about that but I managed to implement those in the past and it was quite a fun project!
Oh these are gorgeous. And I’m partial to the kind of things that are based on physics models as opposed to the techniques based on graphics hacks (stacked gradients etc.).
There's something particularly entertaining on developing visuals and watching them come a reality — I hope at some point be able to experiment in this field.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxfEbulyFcY
I've thought before about trying to render skies on the web as a series of gradients overlaid on top of one another. I expect I could have had some level of success and gotten some mediocre results, but it would be nothing compared to what you've created.
Thank you so much for sharing this; it's inspirational, must have taken you a very long time to put together, and I'm blown away by your results.
I was using XNA (Microsoft's C# gamedev platform) and following Riemer's excellent series of tutorials, which have been preserved here[0], but I don't see anything about scattering. I might have gotten that bit from somewhere else. I do recall reading papers with math equations.
[0] https://github.com/SimonDarksideJ/XNAGameStudio/wiki/Riemers...
https://spaceengine.org/
https://github.com/jscanvic/SkySim
Flat earth version for comparison would be fun.