Writing an OpenGL program to animate simulation has always been an interesting idea to me. One day I saw a beautiful picture of the sea that I took at the beach.
Then I thought it would be interesting to simulate the movement of the sea waves. And Instead of using C++ with openGL as people normally do, I decide to use Python combining openGL to implement it. I'm also inspired by thses cool technical youtubers: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbqziZij4Gcow_0M5qJVW1A/videos, https://www.youtube.com/c/MarkJay/videos
While most of openGL programs are implemented with C++, I think combining openGL with another programming language would be interesting. Here I chose to simulate an animation using openGL and Python. The goal of this program is to simulate the movement of the sea waves.
There are several packages used in this program: PyQtGraph, opensimplex, numpy, sys. Note that PyQtGraph requires one of PyQt4, PyQt5 or PySide. One of these packages sould be imported before PyQtGraph.
This program is based on Python 3.9.7 and PyOpenGL 3.1.1a1. Note that to make the program run properly, the version of PyOpenGL should match the version of Python.
I set up a window in PyOpenGL and created a 3D mesh object to represent the surface of water. After setting up the mesh object, its location and color will be changed according to time. To simulate the movement of wave, I used gradient noise function implemented in OpenSimplex. These noise were then updated to mesh object so that it could simulate animation. More details about OpenSimplex: https://github.com/lmas/opensimplex
| Parameters | Function |
|---|---|
| speed | change the speed of the wave movement |
| height | change the height of each wave |
| noiseType | change the noise type that is used |
| nsteps | change the width of each wave |
input the parameters from command line:
The .mov files displaying the result of this program has been attached under the 'result' folder.
2D noise:
3D noise:
4D noise:
In the process of adjusting these parameters, I found that high value of height does not reflect a good wave movement. While the moving speed is high, the differences between 2D, 3D and 4D are not obvious.