Ocean Simulation and Rendering Proposal

        Ocean Simulation and Render Proposal                   Yuanhui Chen, Tao Lei

For the CIS565 final project, we are going to take ocean simulation and rendering. Yuanhui Chen, 1st year master student in CGGT, will mainly work on rendering part. Tao Lei, 1st year master student in EE, will focus on simulation. Fluid animation if popular in games, special effects. However, it is hard to get desired effects due to its computing complexity. So exploring the computing power of GPU becomes an effective solution.

We are going to use Smoothed Particles Hydrodynamics(SPH) method to do the ocean simulation. SPH's drawback over grid-based method is that it requires large number of particles to produce simulation of equivalent resolution. But, since we are using GPU, which is good at dealing with computation intensive tasks, such drawback should be no longer exist. Since SPH method is inherently parallelism, less data dependent, which is perfect to be implement on GPU. Although physically based fluids animation has historically been the domain of high-quality offline rendering due to great computational cost(GPU Gem Chap 30.1 pg633), we are going to simulate it in real-time.

For the rendering part, we will try several methods then determine which one to implement at last. First option is to use marching method to generate isosurface from density field and then use volume rendering to visualize isosurface. The marching method is based on a paper "Using the CPU programmable Geometry Pipeline". It combines the marching cubes and tetrahedra. The second option is photon mapping. Photon mapping is a good choice for add refractions, reflection and global illumination, however it is expensive, especially when we need to change the view frequently.

We also plan to add interactions:interaction between ocean and coast, interaction between water and floating objects. We refer "Animating the Interplay Between Rigid Bodies and Fluid". It developments the SPH model by adding rigid body forces and enforcing rigid body motion. We will also take the wind effects into consideration.

Although this project is ocean simulation and rendering, we are not going to confine our work in ocean. We may also cover cloud and terrain simulation and rendering in our work to make our picture rich and full.


Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNPJKBjuHIY (ocean simulation)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d818Bjef6Yc (ocean render)