Real-Time Physically Accurate Ocean Surface Simulation In Unity

For his bachelor thesis, Saulius Vincevičius researched the development and implementation of a real-time ocean simulation model, aiming to address some key challenges in the field, such as removing tiling artifacts, adapting to various weather conditions from calm to stormy, and ensuring efficient rendering on both low- and high-end devices.

This project resulted in a Fourier transform-based ocean model that uses real-world data to accurately simulate different weather conditions. It also tackles the tiling issue with multiple cascades, making the ocean surface visually smoother. The model, including a fast Fourier transform algorithm, is implemented on a GPU for efficient performance across various devices.

According to the developer, it runs at 1.65 ms on an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 with a texture size of 256 and 3 cascades. This is fast enough for real-time performance and produces fairly realistic results. Additionally, there's still room for optimization, such as compacting the FFT calculations.

Saulius uploaded the code for this project on GitHub so you can learn, modify, and use it in your own work as you wish. Grab it here and join our 80 Level Talent platform and our new Discord server, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, TikTok, and Threads, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.