Towards Real-Time Visual Simulation of Water Surfaces

In this paper we demonstrate the benefits of the most current nVidia graphics chip set for realistic simulation and rendering of dynamic water surfaces in real-time. In particular we employ programmable vertex shaders for the simulation of the water surface height field and for the displacement, transformation and lighting of vertices. To keep bandwidth requirements low a superposition of NURBS surfaces generated by the hardware through OpenGL evaluators and gradient noise implemented in the shader program itself is proposed. Furthermore, environment cube-mapping is used to enable realistic rendering. Our method can efficiently simulate effects such as refraction, reflection and the Fresnel term to model the optical characteristics of water. Although in this work only the simulation of a certain class of natural phenomena is exemplified, the proposed method is suitable for visually representing other effects as well.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: VMV
• Authors: Jens Schneider, Rüdiger Westermann
• Keywords: Dynamic Water Surfaces, Programmable Vertex Shaders, VMV 2001, VMV 2008, Water Surface