Rigid Body Interaction for Large-Scale Real-Time Water Simulation

Abstract

Simulating large amounts of water in real time is often achieved using heightfield methods. Allowing the water to interact with rigid bodies is essential for applications such as games, but traditional heightfield interaction methods concentrate on water-to-body effects by letting water flow through the bodies. We instead take an approach where the bodies block water. Our earlier method is improved in several ways, taking steps toward a single method to create both water-to-body and body-to-water effects. The new method is also visually compared to a traditional method by Thürey et al. A drawback of our method is that it has some grid aliasing artifacts that appear especially when the method is used for floating bodies. However, our method is demonstrated to work together with the Thürey method, which allows us to get the best of both worlds to simulate both floating and blocking bodies in a single scene. The method runs in real time for large areas of water even with a very limited GPU budget.