Proland Documentation - Ocean Plugin
The ocean plugin provides two tasks to draw an animated ocean. The first one synthesizes the ocean surface with a sum of trochoids, while the second one uses a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). Both tasks can either draw a flat ocean or a spherical one. Both tasks also provide to ocean shaders the necessary data to compute ocean lighting as described in "Real-time Realistic Ocean Lighting using Seamless Transitions from Geometry to BRDF", Eric Bruneton and Fabrice Neyret, Eurographics 2010. The "ocean1" and "ocean2" examples illustrate how these two tasks can be used. This plugin does not depend on any other plugin.
At each frame, the proland::DrawOceanTask does the following:
- update the uniforms in the associated ocean shader related to the current camera position (i.e. matrices to transform between the "ocean frame" described below, the world frame, the camera frame and the screen frame).
- update the uniforms describing the horizon curve equation y=f(x) - see below.
- update the uniform in the associated ocean shader related to the current time.
- update the grid used to draw the ocean in screen space, if the viewport as changed since the last frame.
- draw this grid with the ocean shader, which is then responsible for most of the work (discarding triangles above the horizon, displacing the remaining vertices based on the current time and waves data, and shading the ocean fragments).
The proland::DrawOceanFFTTask is very similar:
- update the uniforms in the associated ocean shader related to the current camera position (i.e. matrices to transform between the "ocean frame" described below, the world frame, the camera frame and the screen frame).
- update the uniforms describing the horizon curve equation y=f(x) - see below.
- perform a FFT to update the textures representing the ocean's height. This FFT is performed with shaders on GPU (the shaders for doing that are provided in the "ocean2" example).
- update the grid used to draw the ocean in screen space, if the viewport as changed since the last frame.
- draw this grid with the ocean shader, which is then responsible for most of the work (discarding triangles above the horizon, displacing the remaining vertices based on the current time and waves data, and shading the ocean fragments).
The "ocean frame" is a local reference frame in which all displacement and shading computations are done. The origin of this frame is the vertical projection of the camera on the ocean's surface. Its z axis is the vertical, and its xy plane corresponds to the ocean surface at rest. For a spherical ocean, this xy plane corresponds to the tangent plane to the sphere at the radial projection of the camera on the sphere.
The ocean frame is thus a frame which is moving with the camera. Of course the ocean surface is not moving with the camera, so we cannot directly use this frame to evaluate the ocean surface. Instead we use a (dx,dy) offset, relatively to the origin of the ocean frame. That is, to evalute the ocean surface at a point p=(x,y) in ocean frame, we evaluate the ocean height function at (x-dx,y-dy). Initially this offset is set to 0. It is then updated at each frame, to compensate for the camera moves (see below). It is reset to 0 each time the camera goes above the altitude at which the ocean is no longer displayed (we do this to ensure that the offset is small, in order to avoid numerical precision problem. Note that we change the offset only when the ocean is not displayed, so no popping can be seen due to this sudden change).
The offset is updated at each frame as follows: if P(f) is the matrix transforming world coordinates into ocean frame coordinates at frame f, then the offset O(f)=(dx,dy) at frame f+1 is set to O(f+1)=O(f)+P(f+1)P-1(f)[0 0 0 1]T
The horizon is managed differently in Proland than in the source code provided with the above paper: instead of computing at each frame a grid covering only the ocean, the proland::DrawOceanTask draws an immutable grid covering the whole screen. However, the vertex shader moves the vertices above the horizon curve on this curve, based on the equation of this curve, whose coefficients are computed on CPU and passed in the "horizon1" and "horizon2" uniforms.
