ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a method for creating a fully dynamic multilayered real-time water rendering approach. This approach can represent the volumetric properties of water and the physical formation of volumetric foam, thereby creating much higher visual fidelity than previous real-time approaches. It is based on a very fast particle-based fluid simulation that is fully hardware-accelerated using Nvidia PhysX and rendering in OpenGL, and therefore easily runs at real-time frame rates. The dynamics of water as an incompressible fluid can be described by a version of the Navier-Stokes equations, which apply Newton's second law and conservation of mass to fluid motion. Smoothed-particle hydrodynamics (SPH) is a robust and fast way for simulating the behavior of water. Rendering water with a scanline renderer in an efficient manner is a twofold problem: first, a water surface has to be extracted from the simulation data and second, the shading of this surface has to take into account the volumetric properties of water.
