Real-time Interactive Snow Simulation using Compute Shaders in Digital Environments

Creating realistic physically-based systems such as weather, water, or light for digital environments (DEs) is an important topic in computer graphics. This paper describes a method utilizing compute shaders to implement dynamic manipulation of meshes to realistically simulate how loosely packed snow, or other transformable surfaces, behave when it is stepped on or otherwise manipulated by objects or agents in a VE. Additional features of the method include accumulation over time, wind direction, and other phenomena that serve to facilitating the simulation. Conditions of the environment were tested using physically-based reinforcement learning (RL) agents walking and running around the VE, leaving behind trails in the snow, to assess computational efficiency and robustness. Results show that the system is robust and computationally efficient running at +30 frames per second (FPS) with up to 100 agents under various conditions. Visual inspection of imagery which was captured during the tests also indicates possibilities in creating larger areas in which the snow has been altered in realistic human-like patterns.