Real-Time Interactive Hybrid Ocean: Spectrum-Consistent Wave Particle-FFT Coupling

TL;DR

This paper introduces a real-time hybrid ocean simulation combining FFT-based spectral oceans with localized wave-particle patches, ensuring spectral consistency and interactivity for large-scale and detailed wave phenomena.

Contribution

It presents a novel hybrid ocean model coupling global FFT spectra with local wave-particle patches under a unified spectral framework, enabling real-time large-scale and detailed wave interactions.

Findings

Achieves spectral consistency between global and local wave representations.

Enables real-time interactive simulation of large-scale and detailed ocean waves.

Maintains energy and spectral fidelity in a hybrid simulation framework.

Abstract

Fast Fourier Transform-based (FFT) spectral oceans are widely adopted for their efficiency and large-scale realism, but they assume global stationarity and spatial homogeneity, making it difficult to represent non-uniform seas and near-field interactions (e.g., ships and floaters). In contrast, wave particles capture local wakes and ripples, yet are costly to maintain at scale and hard to match global spectral statistics.We present a real-time interactive hybrid ocean: a global FFT background coupled with local wave-particle (WP) patch regions around interactive objects, jointly driven under a unified set of spectral parameters and dispersion. At patch boundaries, particles are injected according to the same directional spectrum as the FFT, aligning the local frequency-direction distribution with the background and matching energy density, without disturbing the far field.Our approach introduces two main innovations: (1) Hybrid ocean representation. We couple a global FFT background with local WP patches under a unified spectrum, achieving large-scale spectral consistency while supporting localized wakes and ripples.(2) Frequency-bucketed implementation. We design a particle sampling and GPU-parallel synthesis scheme based on frequency buckets, which preserves spectral energy consistency and sustains real-time interactive performance.Together, these innovations enable a unified framework that delivers both large-scale spectral realism and fine-grained interactivity in real time.