Real-time animation and rendering of ocean whitecaps

Abstract

We present a scalable method to procedurally animate and render vast ocean scenes with whitecaps on the GPU. The whitecap coverage on the ocean surface is determined using a wave deformation criteria which can be pre-filtered linearly. This allows us to take advantage of the fast mip-mapping and texture filtering capabilities of modern hardware and produce plausible and anti-aliased images for scales ranging from centimetric to planetary in real time.