Real-Time Rendering of Point Based Water Surfaces

Abstract

AbstractIn recent years, attention has been paid to particle-based fluid simulation, with several methods being developed to incorporate particle-based simulation into CG animations. These methods reconstruct water surfaces that are usually represented by polygons. However, the computational cost of the surface reconstruction is quite high. Therefore, it is difficult to render the result of the particle-based simulation at interactive frame rates. To address this, we present a real-time method for rendering water surfaces resulting from particle-based simulation. We present an efficient GPU accelerated surface reconstruction method from particles, sampling the water surface point by point. In addition to rendering the point based water surfaces, the use of the GPU permits efficient simulation of optical effects such as refraction, reflection, and caustics.KeywordsGrid PointSample PlaneIllumination VolumeVirtual CameraFrame BufferThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.