A Study of Techniques in Water Simulation

Minor Project by Abhinav Golas and Akram Khan

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Roadmap
3. Progress
4. Some results
5. Resources Used
6. References
7. Interesting Links

Introduction

Fluid animation is a fascinating and challenging avenue of computer graphics today. There is large amount of research being done in these areas ranging from highly photorealistic rendering of fluids to their real time rendering and simulation. We are primarily interested in simulating and rendering various aspects of ocean waves like calm ocean waves, shallow water waves, huge tsunami class waves with water sprays etc.

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Roadmap

We are currently working on rudimentary implementations of ocean surface rendering methods. Our next step would to probe for interesting avenues for research.

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Progress

• We have done background reading on the Navier-Stokes equation and the various ways it is incorporated in computational fluid models. We have used a SIGGRAPH course on fluid simulation as our reference.
• We have studied the three basic approaches existing today regarding ocean water simulation. These are Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) and ocean-surface methods.
• Concentrating initially on the ocean-surface modeling (and rendering) methods, we have made two implementations .
• The first is an implementation of Gerstner waves.
• We have also made an implementation of statistically modeled waves. This model uses the Fast Fourier transform for an efficient implementation.

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Some Results

Videos of gerstner waves (created with 30 sine waves) and Velocity Perturbed Heightfields rendered using PovRay (mp4 videos)

Statistical Waves

Gerstner

More Gerstner

Velocity Perturbed Heightfields

Gerstner (old)

Mid term presentations

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Resources Used

The code for generating the Gerstner Wave and the FFT-based height fields has been written in Visual-C++ (Windows). We then use POVRAY to render these.

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References

• The Elements of Nature: Interactive and Realistic Techniques, SIGGRAPH 2004 Course 31
• Fluid Simulation, SIGGRAPH 2006 Course Notes

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Interesting Links

Mind boggling...

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We reserve the right to set the reader's underwear on fire. Abhinav Golas and Akram Khan
Revised: 02/09/07.