Procedural 2D Cumulus Clouds Using Snaxels

This thesis develops a procedural modeling algorithm to model cumulus clouds or objects with similar shapes and surfaces in 2 dimensions. Procedural modeling of clouds has been extensively studied and researched in computer graphics. Most of the literature follows physical characteristics of clouds and tries to model them using physically-inspired simulations. Cumulus clouds, volcanic ash clouds and similar naturally shaped bodies come in many different shapes and sizes, yet the surfaces share similarities and possess high irregularities in details which makes them difficult to model using conventional modeling techniques. We propose a framework for modeling such surfaces and shapes with minimal user intervention. Our approach uses an active contour model which propagates through a tessellation. In this thesis, we will describe our technique for modeling cloud looking structures and we will present our results of our algorithm and show case a simple user interactive framework as well.