high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

A non-photorealistic rendering style is constantly chosen in games to emphasize the fantasy of the story. In this scenario, the presence of natural elements such as water is common. Simulation and rendering of water in 3D worlds still presents some technical challenges though. This paper describes an approach to render cartoon style water in real time environments. The method takes a Smoothed Particles Hydrodynamics (SPH) fluid simulation as input and obtains its surface using a point splatting technique, employing a dynamic cartoon style shading on its visualization. It also takes into account refraction and reflection, and use a bilateral filter to smooth the fluids surface and prevent a jelly-like appearance in the final rendering. An empirical analysis were made in order to determine a speed/quality trade-off. All steps of this solution were implemented directly on the GPU, producing cartoon water animation with a great number of particles at a frame rates compatible with real-time applications such as games.