CommonVolumeShader: Simple and portable specification of volumetric light transport in X3D

Rendering volumetric phenomena with believable appearance can add tremendous realism to virtual scenes. We introduce the CommonVolumeShader node, an extension of the X3D standard which has been specifically designed for physically-based rendering of participating media. CommonVolumeShader allows content authors to specify optical properties in a concise and purely declarative way and can accurately capture the appearance of many volumetric phenomena. We demonstrate results with implementations for an interactive ray tracer and a rasterization-based pipeline.