Hello! I wonder if anyone know a link, a way, or a toturial on how to simulate liquids! The goal is to make a sea wave, the thing is that its going to curl over, so a high map is no option.... any ideas? A 3D Gridd, with springs atatched betwean the corners? a flatt 2D wave simulation, extruded along the wave line? anything? I want a dynamic game world, and the sea is perfect, but what is the sea without the waves? -Anders-Oredsson-Norway-

Well, to accurately simulate waves, takes alot of processing power, so doing it in real-time is a bit out of the question. You have to know why waves form, how they break, it''s because the bottom slows down and the top doesn''t. The only way I can see you accurately simulating waves is by having a dense 3D net of particles that make up the water, and attach each one by a force/distance function, then calculate friction, movement and all the rest for each particle. That is NOT for real-time though, I have no idea how it could be done for that. Perhaps you could just fake it with a rotating and sinking curve at the shore?

Its not impossible to do passable ocean waves in real-time. Won't be completely realistic but maybe good enough for games. Bump maps, per-pixel lighting, and particle systems can make the water look damned good. Look at the water in Blood Wake for Xbox:

http://xbox.ign.com/previews/16347.html

I don't know if there are any videos of this out there---it helps to understand the goodness of their water to see it live. (Which I have.) They even have decent looking wave-breaks.

You might check out Jerry Tessendorf's (from Cinesite) research on ocean wave simulation. Its quite advanced and, supporting python_regious's comment, not built for real-time. But enlightening anyway. He did a paper at SIGGRAPH 2001, in course #47 on simulating nature. You should be able to buy the course notes CD from www.siggraph.org. A web search might turn up a paper of his on the web.

My educational background is aerodynamics and CFD, primarily for aircraft flight simulation and design. Lately, on the game development side of things, I've been doing some work on realistic water simulation, using a very fast 2D Navier-Stokes solver (that supports moving and rotational, viscous water around arbitrary boundaries at real-time frame rates) plus some extras that add the 3rd dimension using physically-based heuristics. Since that's all proprietary, I can't give any details at all in an open forum. But it is showing some promising results.

Graham Rhodes
Senior Scientist
Applied Research Associates, Inc.

Edited by - grhodes_at_work on August 31, 2001 2:24:55 PM

have phun

Nice , although they are ripples not waves.