Real-time synthesis and rendering of flowing water in Chinese Ink Paintings

It focuses on a special category of Chinese Ink Painting, the landscape painting. Usually, the main elements in the landscape painting are mountains and water. We propose a simple method to synthesize the flow of water in the picture to make an artistic conception of it can be understood. The paper presents a real-time method to simulate and render the turbulent flow and splash of stream water over irregular terrain and dynamic rigid objects. In order to achieve real-time frame rates, we adopt a GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) particle system to perform the simulation and exploit 2D metaballs with billboards to represent the 3D water surface. Besides, our billboard rendering method for splash surface does not possess the traditional clipping artifact. Although our proposed method is not a direct physical simulation, the results are empirically plausible and efficient, and especially suitable for interactive graphics application such as computer games.