Water-rendering literature overview

The water-rendering corpus organizes around a recurring hybrid strategy: simulate only the low-frequency/structural behavior needed for motion, then add high-frequency visual detail and optical cues cheaply. The survey separates deep-water parametric/spectral methods from shallow-water fluid methods and identifies foam, spray, and light interaction as separate realism layers #4S5XNT #CZNWCP River methods use coarse or procedural velocity fields plus advected wave textures: Arnold et al. combine 2D Navier–Stokes, hydrostatic pressure columns, and texture advection #8KBMFE #T9Y2PR Yu et al. compute local steady flow and use screen-space sampled wave sprites for huge terrains #3UZ7TP #AL6YQ9 their later Lagrangian texture-advection method uses deformable particle grids to preserve both flow and texture spectrum #DZCPD6 #KSH8JS Vlachos’s Portal 2 production method is the cheapest end of this continuum: artist-authored flow maps distort two normal-map layers, with offsets and noise hiding repetition/pulsing #6ELMAT #XVFV3N Shallow-water work adds effects a height field cannot express: Thürey et al. detect steep fronts and spawn connected-particle sheets for overturning waves, drops, and foam #KHRCTA #XFKY8Q Ojeda and Susín layer FFT/noise normals, advected foam, photon caustics, and screen-space reflection/refraction over a shallow-water simulation #BVUXWL #PBZNNB Scherzer et al. target fully dynamic particle fluids, using screen-space depth/thickness layers, adaptive curvature-flow smoothing, and Weber-number-based volumetric foam #G3TYUA #YJNSYU Surface Wavelets is the strongest large-scale wave paper: it simulates slowly varying amplitudes over space/frequency/direction on a coarse grid, reconstructs detailed waves separately, supports obstacles and artistic control, and runs a 4 km × 4 km scene at 60 fps #RFLQDX #764D8D #WKY9MT it cannot handle breaking waves or splashes because it is linear #YWWZAM Specialized cheap methods include halftone-mask foam dissipation with under 3% overhead #KFWVK3 #V5XDSY Bézier-curve river networks with streaming normal maps #QGESFA #MSQQ8G and distance-dependent switching among Stokes, cosine, and bump-mapped wave models #H2E2UR #EYM9N6