Large Scale Ocean Water Rendering Using LOD Control

Ocean water rendering has become a very popular field in computer graphics in recent years. Water scenery is essential for many applications such as 3D games, digital movies, virtual reality, flight simulation and GIS, usually interactive speed is needed. To render a large scale water surface, besides the water light effects like reflection and refraction, the most important thing is real-time rendering. Level of detail control is used to diminish the rendering triangle numbers, so that we can get a faster rendering speed.This paper firstly studied on water surface modeling. The Fast Fourier Transformation method is an effect approach in the Fourier domain, by this approach, we can get the water height field at any given time, and the wave effect is close to reality.Rendering larger scale water surface needs the GPU to process tremendous vertex and fragment data, level of detail is a model simplifying method. By level of detail control, the rendering triangle number is regularly cut down. When rendering the water height field, we use a geometry clipmaps method to control the level of detail. Geometry clipmaps is a view centered approach, and can provide a stable rendering speed.Finally, we render the visual effect by apply an environment map, the reflection and refraction are both modulated, the Fresnel phenomenon of reflection and refraction then greatly increases the scene's reality.A large scale water rendering framework using level of detail control is implemented in this paper, and its reality and interactive rendering is suitable for rendering water scenery in 3D applications.