Advected river textures

We present a new method for the realistic real-time simulation of rivers. Our solution includes a 2D fluid solver that simulates the flow of a river’s surface, an efficient method for adaptively computing 3D flow information and an animated 3D procedural wave texture that is advected through the fluid via advection particles in order to mimic the highly detailed fluid surfaces that are characteristic of rivers. Our technique that couples animated texture advection with a pseudo-3D fluid simulation produces stable results that are representative of large-scale real-world rivers and suitable for use in real-time applications. Our system surpasses prior work on real-time river rendering both with regards to efficiency and visual quality, whichwe establish through the rendering of rivers tens of kilometers long. Copyright # 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.