Simulation of water surface using current consumer-level graphics hardware

Abstract

Water surface visualization is an important research topic in computer graphics. This paper presents a novel method of water surface simulation by Secondary Distorted Textures (SDT), which realistically simulates and visualizes the reflection and refraction of calm water in real-time using current consumer-level hardware. The proposed method renders water surface using two stages of texture maps. 1. The first texture map stores the 3D geometries’ perspective reflection with respect to 3D perspective view; 2. The second texture map stores the distortion results of the first reflection map with lighting effects. Perlin noise is used to generate random height map. Reflection and refraction are obtained and stored in the secondary distorted texture map with Fresnel effects for each frame. At rendering pass, the SDT is directly tiled on water surface. This paper also discussed the rendering of transparent geometry, which have view-dependent of lighting effects features. Experimental results demonstrated that our method can render realistic geometry nearby dynamic water surface at the frame rates of 70-100 FPS by NVIDIA Quadro k5000 graphic card. The existing texture mapping and bump mapping methods were compared for illustrating that our method produced high realistic water surface without aliasing reflection.