A synthetic fractal terrain patch before erosion simulation. The same terrain patch after erosion simulation. Rayleigh scattering is what makes the sky blue, while Mie scattering makes the sky whitish on a hazy day. Efficiency of scattering is in turn affected by the local density of the atmosphere. Both scattering and GADD models are critical to obtaining the aerial perspective necessary for realistic landscape renderings.
Aerial perspective provides a sense of scale in synthetic landscape imagery.
Proceduralism A distinguishing aspect of my methodology in image synthesis is proceduralism . This year I co-authored the first book on the topic. I'm currently teaching a course on procedural methods for computer graphics. As a proceduralist, I generally constrain my images to be the exact output of a computer program, that program being as terse as possible. From the standpoint of formal logic, this implies that the images are theorems which have been derived in a formal system.