Semantic-Aware, Physics-Informed, Geometry-Grounded Weather Video Synthesis

Chenghao Qian, Nedko Savov, Lingdong Kong, Yeying Jin, Rui Song, Wenjing Li, Zhun Zhong, Jiaqi Ma, Gustav Markkula, Luc Van Gool

Weather synthesis aims to add weather effects to input videos while preserving scene identity, structure, and motion. The key limitation of existing methods is the lack of diversity in weather appearance and effective control over weather dynamics (e.g., temporal evolution and particle motion). Most approaches rely on text prompts, which are inherently underspecified and often fail to produce detailed weather characteristics. Additionally, general-purpose video editors optimized for clean and aesthetic outputs tend to suppress heavy weather phenomena, making dense particle effects difficult to generate. To address these, 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 the synthesis into three conditional signals, so that each provides 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. Specifically, we introduce (1) semantic-aware appearance anchoring to establish the target appearance from scene semantics and user input; (2) physics-informed dynamic simulation to generate particle effects by simulating a Gaussian-represented particle field under gravity, wind, and turbulence; and (3) geometry-grounded video synthesis to align the simulated particles with target scene geometry and synthesize the final video. Experiments demonstrate that our method produces diverse, physically and visually realistic weather effects. Furthermore, we show that our synthesized data significantly improves the robustness of autonomous driving semantic segmentation under adverse weather conditions. Project page: https://jumponthemoon.github.io/w-crafter/.