Hydraulic Flow Simulation on Dynamical Changing Terrain

Abstract

Water simulation and terrain change are both important aspects in computer graphics and useful in producing realistic interactive environment. We present a step to combine the two phenomena together. In our system terrain is carefully organized to make it can be modified easily. The water flow is calculated by the shallow water simulation, which is a 2D simplification of Navier-Stocks equations. When the terrain is changed by external force, the stream's original path may be broken or form new branches, meanwhile the water flows through the new path accordingly. We design the method skillfully to make it suits the GPU's multi-kernel architecture, so can take full advantage of the parallelism of current powerful graphics hardware. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is suitable for real-time simulation of a variety of scenes including tracks on wetland, river diversion, adding obstacles into the water, etc.