Water Simulation and Rendering from a Still Photograph

ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2022 (Conference Papers)

Ryusuke Sugimoto, University of Waterloo, Canada
Mingming He, Netflix, USA
Jing Liao, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Pedro V. Sander, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong

Abstract

We propose an approach to simulate and render realistic water animation from a single still input photograph. We first segment the water surface, estimate rendering parameters, and compute water reflection textures with a combination of neural networks and traditional optimization techniques. Then we propose an image-based screen space local reflection model to render the water surface overlaid on the input image and generate real-time water animation. Our approach creates realistic results with no user intervention for a wide variety of natural scenes containing large bodies of water with different lighting and water surface conditions. Since our method provides a 3D representation of the water surface, it naturally enables direct editing of water parameters and also supports interactive applications like adding synthetic objects to the scene.


Video


Publication

This work was presented in ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2022, which took place in Daegu, South Korea from December 6 to 9. 
@inproceedings{Sugimoto2022:WaterAnim,
	author = {Ryusuke Sugimoto and Mingming He and Jing Liao and Pedro V. Sander},
	title = {Water Simulation and Rendering from a Still Photograph},
	year = {2022},
	isbn = {9781450394703},
	publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
	address = {New York, NY, USA},
	url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3550469.3555415},
	doi = {10.1145/3550469.3555415},
	booktitle = {SIGGRAPH Asia 2022 Conference Papers},
	numpages = {9},
	location = {Daegu, Republic of Korea}
}