Performance

Triton adapts to the system you're on, taking advantage of any parallel computing abilities it can find. It will make use of general-purpose GPU (GPGPU) technologies to accelerate the simulation of thousands of waves at once, hooking into CUDA, OpenCL, or DirectX11 Compute Shaders (DirectCompute) capabilities exposed by your system's drivers. Where possible, the simulation of ocean waves is done entirely on the GPU, from the fast-Fourier transforms (FFTs) that simulate the waves all the way to generating and shading the ocean's mesh. We also take advantage of Intel's Integrated Performance Primitives library and OpenMP to take advantage of multi-core and parallel CPU's on your system. The result is thousands of waves being simulated at once, at hundreds of frames per second on modern hardware.

Serious Simulation Features

Unlike other water rendering technologies, Triton is fully compatible with round-Earth, geocentric coordinate systems. Whether you're using an ellipsoidal WGS84, spherical, or flat coordinate system, Triton will render infinitely large bodies of water that will match up with the rest of your Earth model, viewable from any altitude without loss of performance.

Not just eye candy, Triton can provide accurate visuals to match a set of given environmental conditions. A collection of wind fetches may be passed into Triton, allowing it to produce wave heights and motion consistent with any wind speed and direction. Alternately, Triton will take a given Beaufort scale number, and automatically produce ocean visuals to match it.

Unmatched Versatility

Using Triton won't tie you to a single 3D engine; it integrates easily with any engine built on top of OpenGL 2.0, OpenGL 3, OpenGL4, DirectX9, or DirectX11. We provide integration examples for the popular OpenSceneGraph and Ogre 3D engines as well. Pre-built libraries for 32 or 64-bit projects with Visual C++ 2008 or 2010 are provided with the SDK.

Easy Integration

Like SilverLining, Triton will integrate into your game, simulation, or training application with just a few lines of code. Just initialize a few objects, update Triton with your scene's camera and lighting properties, and draw our Ocean object each frame. Triton also offers hooks into your own environment cube maps and planar reflection maps for more accurate water reflections, and exposes its underlying shader objects and source to the application so you may customize them as needed. Hooks into custom memory managers and resource managers are also there for you if you need them. You'll find extensive documentation with the SDK with a detailed programmer's guide and API reference, as well as sample code for OpenGL, DirectX9 and 11, OpenSceneGraph, and Ogre.

Robust

Triton doesn't look good from just a small set of viewpoints - any altitude may be visualized on a truly infinite ocean without impacting performance or visual quality. We use a projected grid technique to ensure geometry is used optimally, with every polygon using a fixed amount of screen space regardless of the camera position or angle - it's nearly a perfect level of detail (LOD) scheme. Tiling artifacts that plague other FFT-patch-based techniques are mitigated with the application of Perlin noise as distance from the camera increases. When you're up close to the water, 3D waves complete with foam effects are in front of you.

Triton also supports above-water and below-water visibility effects, allowing you to match the rendering of the objects in your scene with the visibility of Triton's water surface.

Professional Support

Unlike open source alternatives, you'll always have access to responsive technical support direct from the authors. An email to support@sundog-soft.com is all it takes. Three months of complimentary email support are included with a license purchase, with additional support blocks available for purchase.

Ship Wake Simulation

Simulating ship Kelvin wakes is easy with Triton; just create a WakeGenerator object for all of the ships in your simulation, and update their positions and velocities each frame. Wakes are simulated almost entirely on the GPU for maximum performance, and maintain physically realistic wake angles. Triton's wake simulation isn't limited to ships on a straight path at a constant velocity; whether your ships are accelerating, decelerating, or moving on arbitrary curved paths, Triton will generate a wake to match your ships' motion automatically. The height of the wake waves will increase with the ship's speed.

Triton will also generate optional particle-based spray effects at the head of the wake for you, which increase in height and velocity with the velocity of the ship. As with all waves in Triton, wakes will generate foam effects on their steeper parts - and they will be taken into account when you query the height of the ocean at a given point.