ABSTRACT
In games, explosions can provide some of the most visually astounding effects. This article presents an extension of well-known ray-marching [Green 05] techniques for volume rendering fit for modern GPUs, in an attempt to modernize the emulation of explosions in games
Realism massively affects the user’s level of immersion within a game, and previous methods for rendering explosions have always lagged behind that of production quality [Wrennige and Zafar 11]. Traditionally, explosions in games are rendered using mass amounts of particles, and while this method can look good from a static perspective, the effect starts to break down in dynamic scenes with free-roaming cameras. Particles are camera-facing billboards and, by nature, always face the screen; there is no real concept of rotation or multiple view angles, just the same texture projected onto the screen with no regard for view direction. By switching to a volumetric system, explosions look good from all view angles as they no longer depend on camera-facing billboards. Furthermore, a single volumetric explosion can have the same visual quality as thousands of individual particles, thus, removing the strain of updating, sorting, and rendering them all-as is the case with particle systems.
