Water Wave Simulation And Animation

Making animation of water is an interesting and challenging problem in Computer Graphics. The behavior of water wave is one of the most important aspects of water animation. We propose a statistic model based on an empirical observation, and use hardware-supported real-time rendering techniques to produce realistic scene in water animation. In ourapproacb, we take the wave on the water surface as a height field. We refer to the statistic model proposed by Jerry in [1] and employ Fast Fourier Transformation prescription in Matlab. With the discrete FFT results, we get the height fields per frame and save the data in files. Used the pre-calculated height data, we render the height fields with hardware-assistant OpenGL techniques. In order to satisfy the real-time requirement, we fully use the extended functions of nVidia display hardware. The extension includes environment mapping, multitexture mapping, normal mapping, programmable vertex shader, programmable pixel shader. We render the optical effects of wave surface with cube map and render the caustics underwater with multitexture mapping; to decrease the expense of meshes rendering, we use LOD to tradeoff the large number of meshes, which include mip-map, nonnal map etc. In the first chapter of this thesis, we discuss the challenges of water simulation and give a detailed survey of this subject. In the second chapter, we introduce the basic conceptions and theories of Computational Fluid Dynamics. The third one is our realization of the statistic model based on Jerry's paper. Chapter 4 is the introduction of hardware-supported techniques employed in our thesis. In chapter 5, we describe our work on real-time rendering using the advanced techniques presented in the last chapter. Our thorough project implementation is analyzed in chapter 6. In chapter 7, we sumznsnze our research on water simulation and animation and provide the orientation of future work.