In this paper we demonstrate the benefits of the most current nVidia graphics
chip set for realistic simulation and rendering of dynamic water surfaces in
real-time. In particular we employ programmable vertex shaders for the
simulation of the water surface height field and for the displacement, transformation and
lighting of vertices. To keep bandwidth requirements low a superposition of Nurbs
surfaces generated by the hardware through OpenGL evaluators and gradient noise
implemented in the shader program itself is proposed.
Furthermore, environment cube-mapping is used to enable realistic rendering. Our
method can efficiently simulate effects such as refraction, reflection and the
Fresnel term to model the optical characteristics of water.
Although in this work only the simulation of a certain class of natural phenomena
is exemplified, the proposed method is suitable for visually representing other
effects as well.
