A practical method for real-time ocean simulation

The display of realistic ocean environment is one of the most important research fields in computer graphics. In this work we present a practical algorithm for real-time rendering of realistic and unbounded ocean. Relying on the newest features of graphics programmable units (GPU), our method adopts parallel computing technique for generating ocean surface in GPU and uses efficient shading trips for rendering optical effects of ocean surface. The main features of our work concentrate on three fields: ocean surface generation in CUDA (compute unified device architecture), adaptive ocean surface tessellation based on level-of-detail (LOD), and sophisticated optical effects. Experimental results show that our approach is effective and satisfies the requirements of a realistic real-time simulation system for unbounded ocean environment.