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research article

Iridescent Water Droplets Beyond Mie Scattering

Xia, Mengqi (Mandy)  
•
Walter, Bruce
•
Marschner, Steve
July 1, 2023
Computer Graphics Forum

Looking at a cup of hot tea, an observer can see color patterns and granular textures both on the water surface and in the steam. Motivated by this example, we model the appearance of iridescent water droplets. Mie scattering describes the scattering of light waves by individual spherical particles and is the building block for both effects, but we show that other mechanisms must also be considered in order to faithfully reproduce the appearance. Iridescence on the water surface is caused by droplets levitating above the surface, and interference between light scattered by drops and reflected by the water surface, known as Quetelet scattering, is essential to producing the color. We propose a model, new to computer graphics, for rendering this phenomenon, which we validate against photographs. For iridescent steam, we show that variation in droplet size is essential to the characteristic color patterns. We build a droplet growth model and apply it as a post-processing step to an existing computer graphics fluid simulation to compute collections of particles for rendering. We significantly accelerate the rendering of sparse particles with motion blur by intersecting rays with particle trajectories, blending contributions along viewing rays. Our model reproduces the distinctive color patterns correlated with the steam flow. For both effects, we instantiate individual droplets and render them explicitly, since the granularity of droplets is readily observed in reality, and demonstrate that Mie scattering alone cannot reproduce the visual appearance.

  • Details
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Type
research article
DOI
10.1111/cgf.14893
Web of Science ID

WOS:001047686600013

Author(s)
Xia, Mengqi (Mandy)  
Walter, Bruce
Marschner, Steve
Date Issued

2023-07-01

Published in
Computer Graphics Forum
Volume

42

Issue

4

Article Number

e14893

Subjects

Computer Science, Software Engineering

•

Computer Science

•

light-scattering

•

mechanism

•

sphere

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

Available on Infoscience
September 11, 2023
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/200489
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