Physics-Based Real-Time Water Animation

In computer graphics,the simulation of the water began in the eighties of the twentieth century,however,it is still significant and challenging now.The traditional process-based method is hard to be competent for the realistic water simulation,relatively the physics-based method can present realistic water movement better,since considering the inner physics cause of the water movement. However,the complexity of the physical computation often leads to serious performance degradation,and can not meet the real-time needs from various applications.So this paper aims to solve the problem with modeling,controlling, rendering and details by seeking for a tradeoff between the realistic and real-time, and to build a realistic and real-time water animation system with various wave effects.The main work and achievements of the dissertation can be summarized as follows:1.Usual physics-based water animation modeling and numerical algorithms are summarized.An implementation of dam-breaking animation is simulated based on the shallow water equations and a powerful numerical tool named Finite Volume Method.The computation of the modeling is accelerated by taking advantages of the parallelism of GPU(Graphics Processing Unit) based algorithm,and the real-time dam-breaking animation is realized with this accelerated strategy.2.A fast algorithm for water simulation is presented,based on the idea of spread though the neighboring regions in Cellular Automata.A new controlling strategy is used,that the drive parameters of the water movement is taken separately, so it's easy to change parameters in real time while generating various water waves.3.A view-point-dependent multi-resolution meshing method with a adaptive updating strategy method is proposed.By this method,roaming on a large-scale water area in real-time can be easily realized in our system.4.The local illumination model and dynamic texture mapping method are adopted to simulate some effects,such as bumping waves,reflection,refraction,sun light caustics on water surface constructed by coarse grids.This real-time rendering method can greatly enhance the immersion characteristic of water animation.5.A LOD based particle system is presented to simplify the water particle simulation,and a texture based particle rendering method is proposed to achieve real-time animation.By these methods,we implement two water scenes: dam-breaking flow with splashes and a far view animation of a waterfall with lighting and shadowing effects.