Rendering Realistic Snow

The vast majority of previous research of snow in computer graphics has been on the construction of relatively high level geometric descriptions. Indeed this is not unreasonable, as it is the most salient visual characteristic of snow, however, a large number of visual cues come from the surface appearance of snow: its density, purity, cues to curvature and thickness. These cues are essential to the realistic representation of snow in computer graphics. We present a brief overview of the physical optics of snow, and examine techniques to accurately model the surface appearance of snow and its small scale geometry.