An efficient method for real-time ocean simulation

Abstract

Ocean stimulation is important for computer animation, games, and other virtual reality applications. In this paper, a real-time method for simulating integrated ocean environment, including sky sphere, atmospheric system and ocean wave model, is proposed. By this method, the effect of cloud floating in sky sphere is obtained through texture perturbation, while the atmospheric system realizes the air scattering and absorbing effect. The ocean wave model constructs ocean surface mesh by Sine wave and realizes the bumping effect of ocean surface through normal disturbance of bump map method. For the lightening computation of ocean wave, the incident ray can be obtained by sampling the sky sphere and the reflecting light ray can then be calculated through the principle of mirror reflection. The proposed algorithm can be easily accelerated by GPU hardware. Experiments show that the method is easy to implement, and is effective to render ocean at high frame rate © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.