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Arc Blanc: a real time ocean simulation framework

David Algis, Bérenger Bramas, Emmanuelle Darles, Lilian Aveneau

TL;DR

Arc Blanc presents a cohesive real-time ocean simulation framework that unifies Tessendorf-based free-surface modeling with twoGPU-accelerated couplings: fluid-to-solid forces on meshes and solid-to-fluid interactive waves. It contributes a depth-aware ocean velocity computation and a more physically grounded input mask for solid interactions, while maintaining performance through cascaded spectra, IFFT-based height evaluation, and finite-difference–based interactive waves. The framework builds on Tessendorf, JONSWAP, and Donelan–Banner spectra and demonstrates real-time results on desktop GPUs, with scalable handling of multiple solids. Its significance lies in enabling artist-friendly, physically informed ocean scenes with interactive objects, paving the way for hybridization with SPH and large-scale extensions in future work.

Abstract

The oceans cover the vast majority of the Earth. Therefore, their simulation has many scientific, industrial and military interests, including computer graphics domain. By fully exploiting the multi-threading power of GPU and CPU, current state-of-the-art tools can achieve real-time ocean simulation, even if it is sometimes needed to reduce the physical realism for large scenes. Although most of the building blocks for implementing an ocean simulator are described in the literature, a clear explanation of how they interconnect is lacking. Hence, this paper proposes to bring all these components together, detailing all their interactions, in a comprehensive and fully described real-time framework that simulates the free ocean surface and the coupling between solids and fluid. This article also presents several improvements to enhance the physical realism of our model. The two main ones are: calculating the real-time velocity of ocean fluids at any depth; computing the input of the solid to fluid coupling algorithm.

Arc Blanc: a real time ocean simulation framework

TL;DR

Arc Blanc presents a cohesive real-time ocean simulation framework that unifies Tessendorf-based free-surface modeling with twoGPU-accelerated couplings: fluid-to-solid forces on meshes and solid-to-fluid interactive waves. It contributes a depth-aware ocean velocity computation and a more physically grounded input mask for solid interactions, while maintaining performance through cascaded spectra, IFFT-based height evaluation, and finite-difference–based interactive waves. The framework builds on Tessendorf, JONSWAP, and Donelan–Banner spectra and demonstrates real-time results on desktop GPUs, with scalable handling of multiple solids. Its significance lies in enabling artist-friendly, physically informed ocean scenes with interactive objects, paving the way for hybridization with SPH and large-scale extensions in future work.

Abstract

The oceans cover the vast majority of the Earth. Therefore, their simulation has many scientific, industrial and military interests, including computer graphics domain. By fully exploiting the multi-threading power of GPU and CPU, current state-of-the-art tools can achieve real-time ocean simulation, even if it is sometimes needed to reduce the physical realism for large scenes. Although most of the building blocks for implementing an ocean simulator are described in the literature, a clear explanation of how they interconnect is lacking. Hence, this paper proposes to bring all these components together, detailing all their interactions, in a comprehensive and fully described real-time framework that simulates the free ocean surface and the coupling between solids and fluid. This article also presents several improvements to enhance the physical realism of our model. The two main ones are: calculating the real-time velocity of ocean fluids at any depth; computing the input of the solid to fluid coupling algorithm.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 50 sections, 1 theorem, 85 equations, 18 figures, 5 algorithms.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Context
  3. Related works
  4. Ocean free surface simulation
  5. Fluid to solid coupling
  6. Solid to fluid coupling
  7. Ocean waves
  8. Water height
  9. JONSWAP frequency spectrum
  10. Custom Donelan-Banner spectrum
  11. Water displacement and derivative
  12. Cascades
  13. Velocity of water
  14. Waves' height implementation details
  15. Waves' velocity implementation details
  16. ...and 35 more sections

Key Result

Theorem 1

Let: $X=(x_{n,m}), Y=(y_{n,m}) \in M_n(\mathbb{C})$ be two Hermitian matrices. Then the following relation is valid:

Figures (18)

  • Figure 1: Example of rendering of the Arc Blanc framework.
  • Figure 2: Overview of the Arc Blanc framework components: free surface, solid to fluid and fluid to solid coupling.
  • Figure 3: Effect of the parameter $\delta$ on sea state $5$ on the Beaufort scale.
  • Figure 4: Example of a spectrum split into $3$ different cascades: each cascade operates on a different interval of wave vector length.
  • Figure 5: This figure shows a comparison between a uniform discretization in blue and a logarithmic discretization in red. The dotted parts represent the last interpolation toward a null velocity at $y_{min}$.
  • ...and 13 more figures

Theorems & Definitions (2)

  • Theorem 1
  • proof