Reflection of a Horizon Image on the Surface of Water
Christopher S. Stuetzle, Steve Warner, John-Paul Mayer · 2021
Figure 1: A beautiful sunset. We have created a piece of software that renders the reflection of a ”landscape ” texture on a wavy fluid surface. The fluid is represented by a height field and a quad mesh. Waves are created by using wave particles, non-physical entities that determine the influence a wave has on the fluid around it. The scene is ray traced by sending a ray through each pixel, bouncing it off the water and against the texture backdrop. The color of the texture is quieried and influences the color of the water surface. Surface normals are calulated by interpolating vertex normals across each face. The ray tracing is also parallelized, and speeds up to an aymptotic point, leveling off at the number of cores of the machine being used. We produce very attractive non-photo-realistic renderings of landscapes reflecting off a liquid surface.