Low-Memory and Interactive-Rate Animation of Water-Column Based Flows

Abstract

We present an optimization of the height-field water-column based approach for water simulation, providing three-dimensional animation of water flow on natural terrains. Our approach eliminates the storage and management of redundant virtual pipes between columns of water and also removes output dependency for parallel implementation, making it efficient for interactive computer graphics applications. We show a GPU implementation of the proposed method that runs at interactive frame rates with rich lighting effects on the water surface, including light wavelength dependent attenuation and light scattering.