Scalable real-time animation of rivers

Many recent games and applications target the interactive exploration of realistic large scale worlds. These worlds consist mostly of static terrain models, as the simulation of animated fluids in these virtual worlds is computationally expensive. Adding flowing fluids, such as rivers, to these virtual worlds would greatly enhance their realism, but causes specific issues: as the user is usually observing the world at close range, small scale details such as waves and ripples are important. However, the large scale of the world makes classical methods impractical for simulating these effects. In this paper, we present an algorithm for the interactive simulation of realistic flowing fluids in large virtual worlds. Our method relies on two key contributions: the local computation of the velocity field of a steady flow given boundary conditions, and the advection of small scale details on a fluid, following the velocity field, and uniformly sampled in screen space.