A New Algorithm for Water Wave Animation

In recent years, simulating natural phenomena has always been one of the most challenging tasks in computer graphics. Simulating natural phenomena, such as hills, water, cloud, smoke, fire and so on, has been widely used in computer game, movie production, and advertising, etc. As one of its most important parts, simulating water and waves has been given more and more attention. This paper presents a new method for water wave animation based on the theory of small amplitude wave and the technical model of cellular automata. Unlike traditional methods, we neither construct special functions to model the shape of water waves individually, nor solve the complex Navier Stokes equations. Instead, the idea of spread through neighboring regions is adopted to model the water waves dynamically. It is known that the shape of water wave is just like sinusoidal curves approximately due to the theory of small amplitude wave, so we can get the cellular automata model of water animation under different neighboring regions. A particle system is also used to simulate spoondrift in which point elements are taken as particles. The technique of color blending is used in the display of spoondrift in order to increase the visual reality of rendering results. Our results show that our models and methods are effective and efficient. They can even satisfy the requirements of real time animation under generic PC.