Direct3D Rendering Cookbook

Simulating ocean waves

In this recipe, we will look at a tried and tested technique for simulating ocean waves using a series of Gerstner waves at varying amplitudes, wave lengths, frequencies, and directions within a vertex shader (or domain shader).

Getting ready

For this recipe, we need to render a plane along the x and z axis. The completed solution uses an FBX scene with a simple subdivided mesh and UV coordinates for a normal map, however, a quad passed to the tessellation pipeline will also work; or better yet, a mesh generated in the vertex shader based on the SV_VertexID and SV_InstanceID input semantics.

A prerequisite is the mesh renderer and shaders that implement normal mapping as shown in the Adding surface detail with normal mapping ...