I used a very similar approach to render airplane contrails in a flight sim back in the late 90s. The contrail had a binary tree representing the volume of spac

I used a very similar approach to render airplane contrails in a flight sim back in the late 90s. The contrail had a binary tree representing the volume of space taken up by segments of the trail. Projecting this volume into screen space and comparing against a heuristic resulted in either rendering the segment or recursing down the tree for finer detail.