Arc Blanc: A Real-Time Ocean Simulator

Overview & Synopsis

The oceans cover the vast majority of the Earth. Therefore, their simulation has many scientific, industrial and military interests, including computer graphics domain. By fully exploiting the multi-threading power of GPU and CPU, current state-of-the-art tools can achieve real-time ocean simulation, even if it is sometimes needed to reduce the physical realism for large scenes. Although most of the building blocks for implementing an ocean simulator are described in the literature, a clear explanation of how they interconnect is lacking. Hence, this paper proposes to bring all these components together, detailing all their interactions, in a comprehensive and fully described real-time framework that simulates the free ocean surface and the coupling between solids and fluid. This article also presents several improvements to enhance the physical realism of our model. The two main ones are: calculating the real-time velocity of ocean fluids at any depth; computing the input of the solid to fluid coupling algorithm.