A Real-Time Method for Ocean Surface Simulation using the TMA Model

Abstract

In the field of computer graphics, we have several research results to display the ocean waves on the screen, while we still not have a complete solution yet. Though ocean waves are constructed from a variety of sources, the dominant one is the surface gravity wave, which is generated by the gravity and the wind. In this paper, we present a real-time surface gravity wave simulation method, derived from a precise ocean wave model in the oceanography. While there are many ocean wave models in the field of oceanography, they have used relatively simple models in computer graphics area. Especially, there are research results based on the PiersonMoskowitz(PM) model, which assumes infinite depth of water and thus shows some mismatches in the case of shallow seas. In contrast, we started from the Texel, Marsen and Arsloe(TMA) model, which is a more precise wave model and thus can be used to display more realistic ocean waves. We derived its implementation model for the graphics applications and our prototype implementation shows more than 50 frames per second on the Intel Core2 Duo 2.4GHz-based personal computers. Our major contributions to the computer graphics area will be the improvement on the expression power of ocean waves and providing more user-controllable parameters for various wave shapes.