Real-Time Shoreline Simulation In Custom C++ Coastal Renderer
Leonard Saalfrank is working on a new project.
Leonard Saalfrank, also known as OMYOG, has showcased a custom C++ coastal renderer created as a one-week rendering challenge, exploring real-time shoreline rendering, shallow-water simulation, and GPU-driven visual effects.
The project builds on his earlier water-rendering work for Ferocious and expands it with shallow-water waves, GPU-driven breaking waves, and particle-based foam supporting up to 300K GPU particles.
Above is a render handling over 6 million triangles across all passes, using 8K textures at 2K resolution, running at around 250 FPS on an RTX 4090 Laptop GPU with GPU profiling enabled. Without capture and profiling overhead, performance reportedly increases to around 300 FPS.
According to the developer, lighting is handled using Lambertian diffuse and Cook-Torrance microfacet specular shading, while the water surface is rendered with a combination of planar reflections and screen-space refraction. Shadows are produced using a mix of shadow maps and screen-space contact shadows. A Dear ImGui debug interface is also included for inspecting individual render and simulation passes, as well as performance profiling.
Leonard then added particle-simulated foam, replacing the previous approach in which foam was simulated as a texture advected by the water velocity field:
"The new version simulates foam as many individual particles moving across the water surface. These particles are then rendered into a density map, which is also used for rendering. This changes the behavior significantly: foam can now collect in patches, get stretched and pulled apart by the flow, break up around waves, and create much more fine-grained surface detail.
One of my favorite results is that the foam now creates a visible 'lip' at the end of a broken wave, which feels much closer to how waves look in real life."
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