Water Resources

Here's a list of links and references to various pieces of research/games/systems which contain water rendering and could be of interest and inspiration!

If you know of an interesting example of that is missing from this list, please create an issue or pull request!

Category Breakdown

We break down work by the following categories, we also make sure that any work which falls under multiple categories can be found under all of them.

• Animated Waves
  • FFT
  • Gerstner Waves
  • Wave Particles
• Dynamic Waves
  • Eularian
  • Lagrangian
  • Hybrid
  • Other
• Meshing
• Foam
• Flow
• Libraries and Systems
• Collations and Surveys
• Wave Theory
• Lighting and Rendering
• Shorelines

Animated Waves

FFT

• Simulating Ocean Water, Tessendorf, 2001
• Ocean simulation part one: using the discrete Fourier transform, Lantz, 2011
• Ocean simulation part two: using the fast Fourier transform, Lantz, 2011

Gerstner Waves

• Simulating Ocean Water, Tessendorf, 2001
• Water Technology of Uncharted, Gonzalez-Ochoa & Holder, 2012: Gerstner Waves are used for large low-frequency waves in oceans.

Other

• Wave Particles, Yuksel, 2007: The foundation for the animated wave techniques used in Uncharted.
• Water Technology of Uncharted, Gonzalez-Ochoa & Holder, 2012: Wave particles are used to add high-frequency wave information to oceans.
• Rendering Rapids in Uncharted 4, Gonzalez-Ochoa, 2016: Wave particles are scrolled in the direction of river flow to help render rapids.
• Water Surface Wavelets, Jeschke et al., 2018: Can pre-bake steady-state of simulation grid and interpolate between states to get reflecting waves at static-boundary conditions without need for run-time dynamic wave sim.

Dynamic Waves

Eularian Dynamic Waves

• Simulating Ocean Water, Tessendorf, 2001
• Real-time Interactive Water Waves, Ottosson
• Dispersion Kernels for Water Wave Simulation, Canabal et al., 2016
• Real-Time Large Scale Fluids for Games, Kallin
• Fast Water Simulation for Games Using Height Fields, Müller-Fischer, 2008
• Real-Time Open Water Environments with Interacting Objects, Cords and Staadt, 2009: Real-Time Grid-Based solution using Finite Differences Method (FDM) with multiple sims, includes comparison with Wave Particles.
• Water Surface Wavelets, Jeschke et al., 2018: Generalises theory behind Lagrangian Water Wave Packets and proposes a relatively performant Eularian alternative that is used to simulate water on a 4km x 4km grid with low frequency simulation - loss in detail comes from artifacting in dispersion as opposed to lower-frequency waves.

Lagrangian Dynamic Waves

• Wave Particles, Yuksel, 2007: Dynamic water surface waves represented using 2D lagrangian surface-sim where point particles are splatted to a texture and the convolved using a kernel that can create convincing trochoidal wave shapes.
• Water Wave Packets, Jeschke & Wojtan, 2017: Wave packets used to represent the energy of groups of wave trains instead of individual wave crests - allows for more high-frequency information with smaller number of particles.

Hybrid Dynamic Waves

• Real-time Simulation of Large Bodies of Water with Small Scale Details, Chentanez & Müller-Fischer, 2010. Video

Other Dynamic Waves

• Interactive Simulation of Water Surfaces, Gomez, 2000. Found in Game Programming Gems.

Meshing

• Water Technology of Uncharted, Gonzalez-Ochoa & Holder, 2012
• Ocean simulation and rendering in War Thunder, Tcheblokov, 2015

Foam

• Rendering Rapids in Uncharted 4, Gonzalez-Ochoa, 2016
• Ocean simulation and rendering in War Thunder, Tcheblokov, 2015

Flow

• Water Technology of Uncharted, Gonzalez-Ochoa & Holder, 2012: Normal-map scrolling technique used to render rivers in Uncharted: Drake's Fortune.
• Rendering Rapids in Uncharted 4, Gonzalez-Ochoa, 2016: Much more advanced pipeline used than first Uncharted used to create convincing rapids with a multitude of techniques.

Libraries and Systems

• Hydrax, Open-Source plugin for OGRE

Collations and Surveys

• VTP
• A survey of ocean simulation and rendering techniques in computer graphics, Darles et al., 2011

Wave Theory

• What determines the speed of waves in water?, Physics Stackexchange: Longer wavelengths travel faster. For a swell, longest wavelengths arrive first.
• Wind wave, Wikipedia
• Essentials of Oceanography, Thurman & Trujilo: Great text about water waves of all types.
• Environmental Fluid Mechanics, Chapter 4: Waves, Cushman-Roisin, 2019: Nice chapter on water wave phenomena, shows pressure profile of wind travelling over and obstacle.

Lighting and Rendering

• Fresnel Equations (in RGB) Considered Harmful, Hoffman, A presentation on why in many scenarios Schlick's Approximation is preferable to the Fresnel Equations.
• Fresnel Equations, Schlick Approximation, Metals, and Dielectrics Shirley, 2020

Shorelines

• Ocean simulation and rendering in War Thunder, Tcheblokov, 2015
• Unity hackweek crashing waves, @greje656, 2020
• Moana: Crashing Waves, Byun & Stomakhin, 2017
• Creating Real-Time Oceans for Call of Duty: WWII, Vitalone, 2018

Uncagetorised

• Sea Surface Visualization in World of Warships, Kryachko, 2016
• A survey of ocean simulation and rendering techniques in computer graphics, Darles et al., 2011