Visual Effects for Real Time Ocean Water Rendering

Abstract

It is complex to visually represent the surface of ocean water because it is comprised of a multitude of visual effects such as transparency, translucency, and subsurface scattering. We implemented a diverse set of real time rendering techniques by which we achieved a fast and realistic looking ocean simulation. Though our combination of techniques, we are able to achieve realistic-looking ocean water while staying within the technical constraints of real-time rendering at 60 frames per second. To illustrate this, we created a GPU-accelerated rendered utilizing OpenGL containing an implementation of these techniques, combined, for the purpose of rendering ocean water. A full suite of systems was implemented for the ocean rendering engine, including waveform simulation, efficient projection of the ocean onto a perceived infinite grid, dynamic lighting, and all the associated rendering subsystems. Through our combination of our selected techniques, we were able to create a realistic approximation of an infinite ocean surface rendered in only several milliseconds per frame.