Real-time rendering and plausible simulation of oceans

Montag, 28. Juni 2021

For „CV-Tag“, I will present my master thesis on a high level with a lot of moving images an relaxing music. The thesis itself is filled with more technical stuff, broadly summarized by this abstract:

An ocean that reflects wind conditions, reacts to the terrain and interacts with rigid bodies has great potential to improve believability of virtual worlds. Its simulation and rendering need to be fast enough to meet the real-time requirement to be usable in modern games. A multi-band Fast Fourier Transform approach is employed to synthesize a mixed sea ocean surface valid in deep water. A sampling strategy for wave spectra suitable for seamless transitions of sea states was introduced, and recommendations for a complete GPU implementation are made. Deep water is coupled with a shallow water simulation to supplement terrain awareness and rigid body interactions. A recent improvement of the Lattice Boltzmann Method with reduced memory usage is adopted and implemented on the GPU. It is found how its properties can be used to cover a large-scale area with varying level of detail. A performance analysis and discussion of the results demonstrate the suitability for real-time applications, point out deficiencies and suggest exciting future work.