Ocean Waves Animation using Boundary Integral Equations and Explicit Mesh Tracking

Abstract

We tackle deep water simulation in a scalable way, solving 3D irrotational flow using only variables stored in a mesh of the surface of the water, in time proportional to the rendered mesh. The heart of our method is a novel boundary integral equation formulation that is amenable to explicit mesh tracking with unstructured triangle meshes. Our method complements FFT style waves as it is able to handle solid boundaries. It is less memory intensive than volumetric methods and inherently handles the near-infinite depth of the deep ocean. We demonstrate acceleration techniques using the FMM and GPU computing. The natural Lagrangian motion of our model gives inherent adaptivity to our simulation without the need for direct mesh operations.