Skip to main content
Log in

Anti-aliased rendering of water surface

  • Published:
Journal of Computer Science and Technology Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Water surface is one of the most important components of landscape scenes. When rendering spacious water surface such as that of the lakes and reservoirs, aliasing and/or moiré artifacts frequently occur in the regious far from the viewpoint. This is because water surface consists of stochastic water waves which are usually modeled by periodic bump mapping. The incident rays on the water surface are actually scattered by the bumped waves, and the reflected rays at each sample point are distributed in a solid angle. To get rid of the artifacts of moiré pattern, we estimate this solid angle of reflected rays and trace these rays. An image-based accelerating method is adopted so that the contribution of each reflected ray can be quickly obtained without elaborate intersection calculation. We also demonstrate anti-aliased shadows of sunlight and skylight on the water surface. Both the rendered images and animations show excellent effects on the water surface of a reservoir.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. http://www.siggraph.org/education/materials/Hyper-Graph/aliasing/alias0.htm

  2. Fabris A E, Forrest A R. Antialiasing of curves by discrete pre-filtering. InSIGGRAPH'97, Los Angeles, CA, USA, 1997, 24(3): 317–326.

  3. Turkowski K. Anti-aliasing through the use of coordinate transformations. InSIGGRAPH'82, Boston, MA, USA, 1982, 16(3): 19–26.

  4. Cook R L. Stochastic sampling in computer graphics.ACM Trans. Graphics, January 1986, 5(1): 51–72.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Crow F C. A Comparison of antialiasing techniques.IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, ISSN 0272-1716, January 1981, 1(1): 40–48.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Norton A, Rockwood A P, Skolmoski P T. Clamping: A method of antialiasing: textured surfaces by bandwidth limiting in object space. InSIGGRAPH'82, Boston, MA, USA, 1982, 16(3): 1–8.

  7. Don P Mitachell. Generating antial ased images at low sampling densities.Computer Grophics, 1987, 21(3): 65–72.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Kaneda K, Yuan G, Tomoda Y, Baba M, Nakamae E, Nishita T. Realistic visual simulation of water surfaces taking into account radiative transfer. InProc. CAD/Graphics'91, 1991, pp.25–30.

  9. Tadamura K, Qin X, Jiao G, Nakamae E. Fast rendering water surface for outdoor scenes.International Journal of Image and Graphics, 2001, 1(2): 313–327.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Tadamura K, Qin X, Jiao G, Nakamae E. Rendering optical solar shadows using plural sunlight depth buffers.Journal of the Visual Computer, 2001, 17(2): 76–90.

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  11. Wallace J R, Cohen M F. A two-path solution to the rendering equation: A synthesis of ray tracing and radiosity methods. InSIGGRAPH'87, 1987, 21(4): 311–320.

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Xue-Ying Qin.

Additional information

The first, third and fifth co-authors were partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 60021201 and 60373035), Key Research Project of Ministry of Education (Grant No.01094) and the National Grand Fundamental Research 973 Program of China (Grant No.2002CB312102).

Xue-Ying Qin is an associated professor of State Key Laboratory of CAD&CG, Zhejiang University. She received her Ph.D. degree from Hiroshima University in 2001, B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mathematics from Peking University in 1988 and from Zhejiang University in 1991, respectively. Her research interests include computer graphics, visions and image processing.

Eihachiro Nakamae is currently Chairman of Sanei Co. He was granted the title of emeritus professor from both Hiroshima University and Hiroshima Institute of Technology. He was appointed as a researcher associate at Hiroshima University in 1956, a professor from 1968 to 1992 and an associated researcher at Clarkson College of Technology, Potsdam, N.Y., from 1973 to 1974. He was a professor at Hiroshima Prefectural University from 1992 to 1995 and a professor at Hiroshima Institute of Technology from a996 to the end of March 1999. He received his B.E., M.E., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering in 1954, 1956, and 1967 from Waseda University. His research interests include computer graphics, image processing and electric machinery. He is a member of IEEE, ACM, CGS, Eurographics, IEE of Japan, and IPS of Japan.

Wei Hua received his Ph.D. degree in applied mathematics from Zhejiang University in 2002. He joined the CAD&CG State Key Lab in 2002. His main interests include real-time simulation and rendering, virtual reality and software engineering.

Yasuo Nagai is now an associate professor of Hiroshima Institute of Technology. He was appointed a researcher associate at Hiroshima Institute of Technology in 1965, and an associate professor in 1984. His research interests include computer graphics and image processing. He is a member of IEE, IEICE, IPSJ, and ITE of Japan.

Qun-Sheng Peng was born in 1947. He received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of East Anglia, U.K., in 1983. He is a professor and his research interests include computer graphics, computer animation, virtual reality, and point-based modeling and rendering.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Qin, XY., Nakamae, E., Hua, W. et al. Anti-aliased rendering of water surface. J. Comput. Sci. & Technol. 19, 626–632 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02945588

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02945588

Keywords

Navigation