A simplified visual simulation for GIS in consideration with weather and sunlight

A simplified visualization method is proposed for geographic information systems (GIS) in consideration of weather and Sun movement. In order to decrease the computational cost in visualization, the proposed method consists of 2 parts; pre-processing for generating textures and main process for rendering. In the main process, buildings and roads with shadows are visualized by the ray tracing algorithm. Also in the process, sky, snow, and rain are visualized by textures, which are a priori generated in the pre-process. In the pre-process, some textures such as snow and rain are generated by the ray casting algorithm. Then we can obtain images with weather conditions and shadows of sunlight by buildings along the road. It is seen that the computational cost for the main part becomes relatively low in spite of the representation of shadows and weather.