Research On The Simulating Optical Effects Of Underwater Secene

Virtual reality (VR) is a technology which allows a user to interact with a computer-simulated environment, whether that environment is a simulation of the real world or an imaginary world. It can not only create a high-fidelity virtual reality experience, but also the users can react with the virtual environment, which can enhance a sense of interactivity and immersion of the system. It is a comprehensive information technology emerging in recent years with rapid development, which is widely applied to various fields of the society.The construction of realistic maps of natural scene is a very important topic in computer graphics. It needs realistic maps to have accurate simulation of natural phenomena. Realistic rendering of water bodies is a very important part in all natural phenomena. The rendering of underwater optical effects include the rendering of underwater beam, caustics and shadow of underwater objects. The light of the water surface converge and diverge after refraction and reflection of waves, and then make beam because of the scattering suspended particles. Finally they make caustics. In order to make the virtual underwater scenes more real, shadows rendering is also very important. Since the ray tracing method of 20th century 80's , there has been many ways to perform optical effects of underwater scenes. Because of complex underwater optics transmission, it requires a large amount of data calculation with great time-consuming. This paper based on the method of Iwasaki[1] optimized the method. It proposes a fast rendering method of beam and caustics with considering the point of view. And it uses the OpenGL's color-blend technology to render the illumination volume, it uses the OpenGL's color-blend technology,Z-buffer,hardware to render the caustics, and use stencil cache to render the shadow. Therefore, it makes the effect of rendering more fluent under the conditions of ensuring good true sense.This paper first introduces the Virtual reality technology,main technology related to this paper,the existed simulation method of optical effects of underwater scene, then introduces the improved method of simulating optical effects of underwater scene, shows the improved method of rendering light beam,caustics and shadow. At the end shows the experiment results,summarization and the expectation.At present, we have got good results of the simulation to the optical effects of underwater but there are still some questions to for us to address, such as poor interaction of shadow and caustics. In the future we will take full advantage of the functions of GPU to improve the effect to make the underwater scene optical effects more real and more natural.