/godot4-oceanfft

Tessendorf FFT based ocean waves and buoyancy in Godot 4 using compute shaders

Primary LanguageGDScriptMIT LicenseMIT

Godot 4 Ocean Addon

Note

Requires Godot 4.2+

An early work in progress ocean addon for Godot 4 base on Jerry Tessendorf's FFT method for generating the waves, using compute shaders to generate the displacement map, and a quad tree based continuous distant dependant level of detail (CDLOD) system to dynamically manage the polygon density without popping or snapping between LOD levels.

The GLSL shaders that generates the displacement map were ported into Godot 4 from this project. The underlying math is identical, but some things like binding points and how uniforms were accessed had to be changed to work in Godots compute shader API.

Ocean

Features

  • FFT ocean wave simulation, wave energy derived from Unified Spectrum
  • Integrated LOD for surface (CDLOD)
  • Basic buoyancy system
  • Basic underwater effect
  • Basic whitecap rendering
  • Surface shading:
    • Transparency
    • Reflections (provided by ReflectionProbe)
    • Refractions
    • Sub surface scattering

Example Scene Controls

Button Action
`/~ Toggle menu/free cam modes
Mouse Motion Free cam look
Right Click Free cam zoom
W Free cam forwards (locked to horizontal plane)
S Free cam backwards (locked to horizontal plane)
A Free cam strafe left (locked to horizontal plane)
D Free cam strafe right (locked to horizontal plane)
Space Free cam up (locked to vertical axis)
Ctrl Free cam down (locked to vertical axis)
Shift Free cam sprint/move faster

Todo List

  • Improve visual rendering
    • Splash particles
    • Improve refractions
    • Improve underwater effect
  • Lower detail but faster visual shader for lower LOD quads
  • Optimize Quadtree3D at large depths
  • Beach/cliff/rocks interactions
  • Wave collision interactions (boat wakes, splashes, etc.)
  • Multiplayer synchronization? This reference may be helpful for this.

OceanCDLOD

OceanUnderwater

OceanCurve

References

Wave Generation Theory

Water Implementation Examples

These are not exclusively limited to ocean wave implementations, and may include other types of water simulations if they include visual rendering techniques that are of value to reference.

AAA-Game Implementation Examples

These generally don't give much in the way of code examples, but do give a higher level overview of how the whole thing comes together.

Level Of Detail Implementation

Foam/Whitecap Rendering

Wave Collision Interaction

Miscellaneous