I decided to take a closer look at atmospheric scattering in my master thesis. I guess everyone who is interested in this kind of topic once stumbled over Bruneton's precomputed atmospheric scattering model (paper found here), as it is considered the most accurate and realistic scattering model to date. While the paper itself is really good, its a bit short and only introduces the general idea (as most papers do). Although, Bruneton provides the associated source code on his homepage, many people (including me) had problems understanding how it really works. I dont know how many hours (or even days) I was sitting in front of some equations trying to figure out what they are supposed to do.

Fortunately, many people on this forum helped me in understanding the code and therefore I want to give something back to the community by sharing my master thesis which is called "Deferred Rending of Planetary Terrains with Accurate Atmospheres". It can be found on my homepage (direct link can be found here).

In my thesis I was really trying to explain all the tricky parts of Bruneton's scattering model in an "easy" way and to create a document, I wished to have back then. I guess this is also the reason, why it reads almost like an tutorial, rather than an academic work.

In this way I want to thank again the community for helping me during my studies. I really hope my thesis will prove useful to many of you. Last but not least, some screenshots of my results (video can be found here)

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Wow, heard of Bruneton's before, but never really looked at it. The results look great! I'll have to bookmark this in case I ever need it. Awesome work I'm sure.

Very nice, I see you found a way to fix the problem at the horizon line, I've been running into those artifacts myself so hopefully your method fixes it

Looks nice, it only models Earth like scattering, yeah?

Not really. You can choose different values for the scattering parameters (Though finding values that look believable can be hard). I made use of the same parameters Bruneton used in his source code. The basic problem with artifical atmospheres is that the model ensures physical correctness, which means artistic-control is almost non-existant.

Very nice, I see you found a way to fix the problem at the horizon line, I've been running into those artifacts myself so hopefully your method fixes it

Actually it suffers from the same artifacts. However Bruneton suggested various fixes for these artifacts, They are also mentioned in the second last chapter of the thesis.