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Realtime Volumetrics Research
This folder preserves the renderer research notes for future Aquarium volumetric
work. Local source artifacts live in sources/ and extracted working text lives
in extracted-text/; both are gitignored because the cache contains large slide
decks and copyrighted papers. The durable repo surface is the manifest and the
distilled notes.
Files
source-manifest.md: source list, URLs, local cache names, and download notes.synthesis.md: distilled lessons for Aquarium's renderer architecture.
Current Direction
Aquarium should treat volumetrics as a renderer-owned field system, not a fog color slapped onto the final image. The useful production pattern is a frustum-aligned or Grid-aligned volume that stores physical-ish density, extinction, scattering, lighting, and transmittance, then composites solids, transparent surfaces, particles, diegetic UI, and field effects against the same transport result.
Start small: one low-resolution field volume, one Self light source, Beer transmittance, single scattering, stable reprojection/jitter, and explicit debug modes. Add richer atmosphere, clouds, and streaming only after the simple field earns its keep.