Fourier Synthesis of Ocean Scenes

Considerable interest in scene synthesis has focused on fractal techniques such as 1/f noise filtering. However, these techniques produce poor synthetic ocean scenes. A superior technique is presented here that used an empirical sea spectrum model to represent a fully developed sea in nautre. A computer program has been written whereby a user supplies a wind velocity, and a two-dimensional Fourier-domain filter is created whose shape is decribed by the modified Pierson-Moskowitz spectrum. A white-noise image can then be filtered and rendered with a ray-tracing algorithm to produce a realistic ocean scene. Wave motion may be invoked by manipulating teh phase of the Fourier-transormed white-noise image. Several phase-manipulating techniques have been implemented.