Realtime Interactive Water Waves

In this master thesis report a new method for simulating waters surface waves is presented. The method is well adapted for real-time applications and has been developed with computer games in mind.

By simulating the water surface at several different resolutions simultaneously using a construction similar to Laplacian Pyramids dispersion is handled approximately resulting in a complex behavior.

The simulation is also extended with a dynamic level of detail method and phenomenological models for boundaries and high frequency waves. This method is prototyped inside the Frostbite engine developed at DICE and runs at 3 ms per time step on a single core of a Intel Xeon processor with high quality results.