1University of Leeds, UK 2INSAIT, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” 3National University of Singapore, Singapore 4Hefei University of Technology, China 5University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Weather synthesis aims to add weather effects to input videos while preserving scene identity, structure, and motion. Existing methods lack diversity in weather appearance and effective control over weather dynamics. Most rely on underspecified text prompts, and general-purpose video editors—optimized for clean, aesthetic outputs—tend to suppress heavy weather, making dense particle effects difficult to generate.
We propose a Semantic-Aware, Physics-Informed, and Geometry-Grounded framework that steers an off-the-shelf video editor to synthesize diverse global appearances and detailed particle dynamics. We factorize synthesis into three conditional signals, each a distinct and stable source of guidance: semantics specifies what the weather should look like, dynamics governs how it evolves over time, and geometry determines where it should appear in the scene.
Experiments show our method produces diverse, physically and visually realistic weather effects. Moreover, our synthesized data significantly improves the robustness of autonomous-driving semantic segmentation under adverse weather.
Keywords: Weather Synthesis · Video Editing · Particle Simulation
What if snow fell on Rome and rain over desert?
Diverse, temporally coherent weather effects synthesized on real footage.
We decompose weather synthesis into three complementary conditioning signals that jointly steer a frozen video diffusion model—no finetuning required.
A VLM parses scene semantics and an LLM reasons about weather-specific effects from user intent, anchoring the target appearance and producing a refined description for generation.
A particle field of anisotropic Gaussians is evolved under gravity, wind, and turbulence, yielding physically plausible motion that serves as explicit cues for synthesis.
Particles are gravity-aligned to the scene and projected with camera intrinsics/extrinsics into particle-augmented depth, ensuring consistent trajectories and accurate placement.
Beyond visual fidelity, our synthesized data acts as a scalable engine for safety-critical corner cases.
@inproceedings{qian2026weathervid,
title = {Semantic-Aware, Physics-Informed, Geometry-Grounded Weather Video Synthesis},
author = {Qian, Chenghao and Savov, Nedko and Kong, Lingdong and Jin, Yeying and
Song, Rui and Li, Wenjing and Zhong, Zhun and Ma, Jiaqi and
Markkula, Gustav and Van Gool, Luc},
booktitle = {European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV)},
year = {2026}
}