Urban Weathering: Interactive Rendering of Polluted Cities.

Area of Science:

• Computer Graphics
• Environmental Simulation
• Urban Planning

Background:

• Urban buildings visibly deteriorate due to environmental interactions and pollution accumulation.
• Existing methods for simulating weathering effects in virtual urban environments lack a global approach.
• A comprehensive technique is needed to model pollution soiling on an urban scale.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a fast, physically-inspired technique for simulating urban-scale pollution soiling.
• To develop an efficient method for generating realistic images of urban scenes with weathering effects.
• To address the limitations of existing approaches by introducing a global simulation technique.

Main Methods:

• Modeling pollution effects based on wind, rain, and sun exposure, including deposition, reaction, and washing.
• Utilizing a low-cost pre-computation to evaluate city-wide pollution distribution.
• Employing screen-space operators for efficient, interactive rendering of urban weathering.

Main Results:

• An efficient approach for generating realistic urban scenes with pollution soiling effects at interactive rates.
• A pre-computation method requiring reduced memory for storing pollution maps.
• The technique's independence from scene complexity allows adaptation to large and complex urban models.

Conclusions:

• The proposed technique offers an effective solution for simulating urban weathering and pollution.
• This method enables the creation of visually accurate and dynamic urban environments.
• The approach is scalable and suitable for complex urban modeling and visualization.