I've been trying to implement the shallow water equations in Unity, but I've run in a weird bug. I get these strange oscillating ripples in my water. I made some screenshot:
And a video you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crXLrvETdjA
I based my code on the paper Fast Hydraulic Erosion Simulation and Visualization on GPU by Xing Mei. And you can find the entire solver code here: http://pastebin.com/JktpizHW (or see below.) Each time I use a formula from the paper, I added its number as a comment.
I tried different timesteps, for the video I used 0.02, lowering it just made it oscillate slower. I also tried a bigger grid (video uses 100, I tried 200 but then the ripples just were smaller.) I checked all formulas several times, and can't find any error.
Anyone here who can figure out what's going wrong?
Extra info:
As you can see from the pastebin, I programmed it in c#. I used Unity as my engine for visualisation, and I'm just using a grid mesh to visualise the water. I alter the mesh's vertex y component to match the height I calculate.
The DoUpdate method gets a float[][] lowerLayersHeight
parameter, that's basically the height of the terrain under the water. In the video it's just all 0
.
public override void DoUpdate(float dt, float dx, float[][] lowerLayersHeight) {
int x, y;
float totalHeight, dhL, dhR, dhT, dhB;
float dt_A_g_l = dt * _A * g / dx; //all constants for equation 2
float K; // scaling factor for the outflow flux
float dV;
for (x=1 ; x <= N ; x++ ) {
for (y=1 ; y <= N ; y++ ) {
//
// 3.2.1 Outflow Flux Computation
// --------------------------------------------------------------
totalHeight = lowerLayersHeight[x][y] + _height[x][y];
dhL = totalHeight - lowerLayersHeight[x-1][y] - _height[x-1][y]; //(3)
dhR = totalHeight - lowerLayersHeight[x+1][y] - _height[x+1][y];
dhT = totalHeight - lowerLayersHeight[x][y+1] - _height[x][y+1];
dhB = totalHeight - lowerLayersHeight[x][y-1] - _height[x][y-1];
_tempFlux[x][y].left = Mathf.Max(0.0f, _flux[x][y].left + dt_A_g_l * dhL ); //(2)
_tempFlux[x][y].right = Mathf.Max(0.0f, _flux[x][y].right + dt_A_g_l * dhR );
_tempFlux[x][y].top = Mathf.Max(0.0f, _flux[x][y].top + dt_A_g_l * dhT );
_tempFlux[x][y].bottom = Mathf.Max(0.0f, _flux[x][y].bottom + dt_A_g_l * dhB );
float totalFlux = _tempFlux[x][y].left + _tempFlux[x][y].right + _tempFlux[x][y].top + _tempFlux[x][y].bottom;
if (totalFlux > 0) {
K = Mathf.Min(1.0f, _height[x][y] * dx * dx / totalFlux / dt); //(4)
_tempFlux[x][y].left = K * _tempFlux[x][y].left; //(5)
_tempFlux[x][y].right = K * _tempFlux[x][y].right;
_tempFlux[x][y].top = K * _tempFlux[x][y].top;
_tempFlux[x][y].bottom = K * _tempFlux[x][y].bottom;
}
//swap temp and the real one after the for-loops
//
// 3.2.2 Water Surface
// ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
dV = dt * (
//sum in
_tempFlux[x-1][y].right + _tempFlux[x][y-1].top + _tempFlux[x+1][y].left + _tempFlux[x][y+1].bottom
//minus sum out
- _tempFlux[x][y].right - _tempFlux[x][y].top - _tempFlux[x][y].left - _tempFlux[x][y].bottom
); //(6)
_tempHeight[x][y] = _height[x][y] + dV / (dx*dx); //(7)
//swap temp and the real one after the for-loops
}
}
Helpers.Swap(ref _tempFlux, ref _flux);
Helpers.Swap(ref _tempHeight, ref _height);
}