Modeling of Turbulent Water over Natural Terrain

Water phenomena are some of the most visually spectacular effects found in nature. The purpose of this project is to try to model flowing water in rivers, over waterfalls etc with the intent that the model can be used as part of a larger environment or scene. The model presented here uses hydrostatic theory to incorporate a 2D height field and particle system to model respectively the main volume and spray of turbulent water. The user is able to submit any environment formed from spheres and panels making the solution very flexible and adaptable. While the representation used here provides only an indication of the achievable effects and the current results are not yet rendered photo-realistically, the way in which the data from each frame is stored means that integration with a third party ray tracer would not be overly difficult. As would be expected the efficiency of this model depends on the complexity of the scene and while real time speeds are rarely possible the model is not prohibitively slow and compares favorably with alternative efforts.