makarov-mm/water

Realtime Water is a small Windows desktop demo that shows an interactive pool of water sitting on a checkerboard table. The surface stays still until you click and drag your mouse across it, which dips the water and sends ripples outward that bounce off the edges of the table, interfere with each other, and slowly fade away, similar to touching a real pond. Everything you see is calculated live on the graphics card using compute and fragment shaders, built directly on native OpenGL 4.5. There is no physics happening on the processor and no external art assets loaded in: the table, the water's shading, and the waves themselves are all generated by code as the program runs. Under the hood, each frame follows a short pipeline. First, a compute shader solves the classic two dimensional wave equation with damping across a 512 by 512 grid, storing the current and previous water height so it can calculate the next step. Your mouse click adds a dip directly into that height data. Second, the checkerboard table is rendered from a camera's perspective and captured so the water can reflect and refract it realistically. Third, a mesh representing the water surface is displaced according to the wave heights and shaded with reflections, refraction, and a highlight that responds to the angle of view. Finally, a light bloom effect and color tone mapping are applied to the finished image. The project is a self contained Visual Studio solution with no external dependencies or package manager: everything needed to build and run it, aside from Visual Studio itself and a graphics card that supports OpenGL 4.5, is already included. You control it entirely with the mouse, pressing and dragging to create ripples, and pressing escape to quit. It is released under the MIT license, so you're free to reuse or adapt the code for other projects.