Abstract
3D graphics programming is generally done using libraries such as OpenGL, DirectX and Vulkan. Some effects such as lighting, reflection have well defined approaches, however simulating water is known to be a little difficult to achieve. This project of simulating water uses Open Graphics Library (OpenGL), which is a collection of commands to create 2D and 3D graphics. GLSL is an example of shader language. Shader languages are intended to run on a GPU, in the context of graphics pipeline. Simulating water movement has been done taking help of different algorithms of physics for calculating velocity, position and force. The water waves are rendered by manipulating variables such as Points, Triangles and Normals, which are eventually sent to shaders for processing lighting effects, reflection and refraction in the rendered scene. The challenges of simulating water include dealing with different parameters such as reflection, refraction, color of the light and the placement of camera, so the more complex an object interacts with light, the more difficult to render it. Most graphics programming works by rendering the triangles and polygons to the screen by drawing them onto the buffer, like drawing on a canvas. But, for water to look realistic and convincing, it should exhibit reflection and refraction, which doesn’t always work nicely with triangle drawing models as water appearance is heavily dependent on the color of things around it. The goal of the project is to develop/implement reasonable, simple and repeatable approaches of simulating water using 3D Computer Graphics which would be practical, efficient and minimize imperfections in the final product. The result may have imperfections because of the known difficulties of simulating water, but the goal is to make the result as attractive as reasonably possible.