Tag Archives: Insomniac

Eurographics Workshop on Natural Phenomena 2009

EWNP has had interesting papers in recent years, but when it skipped 2008 I thought it was gone.  However it came back in 2009 with five papers, all of which are online except for one:

Procedural Modeling of Leather Texture with Structural Elements:  Not currently available online, but judging from a previous paper by these authors this appears to be about procedural modeling of the cracks and bumps in leather surfaces.  Most real-time applications will use photographed or manually created textures for this, so it is probably not of wide interest to real-time developers.

Interactive Modeling of Virtual Ecosystems: Automatic modeling of plants taking lighting, obstacles, etc. into account.  Might be useful as an automatic modeling tool.

A Geometric Algorithm for Snow Distribution in Virtual Scenes: What the title says; might be useful for automated scene modeling, but probably not for runtime use.

Corotated SPH for Deformable Solids: Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) is commonly used in film production for liquids, smoke, etc.  This paper discusses how to extend the technique to model deformable solids.  Probably not real-time anytime soon.

Real-Time Open Water Environments with Interacting Objects:  This combines the Tessendorf FFT-based method for ambient waves with a different method for interactive waves (waves interacting with dynamic objects).  This is the most relevant paper for real-time rendering; worth a read.

Tessendorf’s FFT method is the current gold standard for non-interactive ocean waves, and is widely used in game and film production.  A description of it can be found on his publication page, under Simulating Ocean Surface.  Tessendorf’s publication page has many more papers of interest, including an algorithm (called iWave) for interactive waves and reports on particle and volume rendering for film production.

Insomniac have a particularly efficient and flexible implementation of a variant of Tessendorf’s method, which they extended to support interactive waves as well.  This method was used in the game Resistance 2, and Insomniac Games have kindly published not just a white paper on the technique, but actual working code! This is part of their admirable Noctural Initiative for technology sharing.  The Noctural Initiative website is highly recommended, as it includes code which has been used in successful game projects by one of the most highly-regarded studios in the industry.

Another interesting approach to interactive waves is Wave Particles, which is described here.