Luminous_Reef_Proposal

1.

REAL-TIME 3D AQUARIUM
·
PROJECT PROPOSAL
Luminous Reef
An interactive, real-time coral-reef environment built from scratch in modern OpenGL — where
procedural coral growth meets dynamic underwater light.
T
Timur
Z
Zangar
Real-Time Computer Graphics · Astana IT University · Final Project Proposal
N
Nurkhan
N
Nurbolat

2.

INTRODUCTION
Diving into an idea
A playable, explorable 3D reef.
The user free-swims a camera through a coral-reef scene rendered entirely with a custom
OpenGL pipeline — no game engine, no pre-built assets pipeline.
Built to showcase the graphics pipeline.
Every stage — scene graph, transforms, shading, texturing — is implemented by the
team, making the pipeline itself part of the deliverable.
Two signature visual systems.
The project's identity comes from procedurally generated coral and dynamic underwater
lighting with caustics, rather than breadth of features.
LUMINOUS RE E F · PROJE CT PROPOSAL
“Real-time, hand-built,
and alive with light.”
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3.

PROBLEM & OBJECTIVES
Why this project, and what it must achieve
The Problem
Ready-made engines (Unity, Unreal) hide the rendering pipeline
Our Objectives
Implement a full OpenGL pipeline: scene graph, camera, and MVP
transforms
behind abstractions, so students finish projects without touching
the math and shaders underneath.
Generate a coral reef procedurally, so the scene needs no handplaced assets
At the same time, most course exercises are small, isolated demos
— a single triangle, a single light — with no cohesive, motivating
Model dynamic underwater lighting with a real-time caustics effect
scene to apply them to.
Deliver a smooth, first-person “dive” camera the user directly
controls
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4.

BACKGROUND
Where we're drawing inspiration from
Procedural generation in games
Techniques from titles like No Man's Sky and
Subnautica show how noise- and rule-based
placement can populate a natural scene without
manual authoring — the same idea we apply to
coral.
Real-time water & light rendering
Underwater exploration games
Screen-space caustics and refraction tricks used
in modern engines let believable underwater
lighting run every frame on consumer GPUs,
without offline ray tracing.
Titles such as ABZû and aquarium-simulator
experiences demonstrate what makes a reef
feel alive to explore: light, motion, and density
of detail rather than complex mechanics.
These are reference points for technique and mood, not sources we're licensing assets or code from — every asset in Luminous Reef is built by the team.
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5.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION
What Luminous Reef will be
A single-scene, real-time 3D environment: the user pilots a free-look camera through a procedurally arranged coral reef, lit by an animated underwater
lighting model, with textured coral, rock, and fish geometry throughout.
IN SCOPE
OUT OF SCOPE (FOR NOW)
Scene graph & full transformation pipeline (model → view → projection)
Fish schooling AI / behavioral simulation
Free-fly camera with keyboard + mouse controls
Physics-based fluid or water-surface simulation
Procedural placement of coral / rock instances
Multiplayer or networked exploration
Blinn-Phong shading plus a real-time caustics effect
Full day-night cycle
Texturing of coral, seabed, and fish models
LUMINOUS RE E F · PROJE CT PROPOSAL
Stretch goals if time allows after the core pipeline is stable.
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6.

METHODOLOGY
The rendering pipeline, step by step
01
02
03
04
05
Scene Setup
Transform Pipeline
Lighting & Shading
Procedural Placement
Texturing & Polish
→
→
Define geometry buffers
Per-object model matrices feed
(VAO/VBO/EBO) for coral, rock,
seabed, and fish meshes.
a shared view/projection chain
driven by the free-fly camera.
LUMINOUS RE E F · PROJE CT PROPOSAL
→
Blinn-Phong base lighting
combined with an animated
caustics shader for underwater
light.
→
A noise/Poisson-disc based
algorithm scatters coral
instances with varied scale &
rotation.
Diffuse + normal maps on
coral/seabed, plus color grading
for an underwater mood.
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7.

FEATURE SPOTLIGHT · 01
Procedural coral & environment
Instead of hand-placing every coral head, we generate the reef floor algorithmically:
Distribution — A Poisson-disc / noise-based sampler scatters coral “seed” points across
the seabed with natural, non-overlapping spacing.
Same algorithm, different seed → an entirely new reef
layout each run.
Variation — Each instance gets randomized scale, rotation, and a color/texture tint, so
repeated meshes don't look copy-pasted.
Performance — Coral instances are drawn with instanced rendering, keeping draw calls
low even with dense placement.
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8.

FEATURE SPOTLIGHT · 02
Dynamic lighting & underwater caustics
Base lighting
Caustics shader
Depth & mood
A Blinn-Phong model lights coral, rock, and fish
An animated caustic texture is projected onto
Distance-based fog and color grading push the
with ambient, diffuse, and specular terms driven
the seabed and coral, mimicking sunlight
palette toward blue with depth, reinforcing the
by a single moving “sun” light.
refracted through a moving water surface.
feeling of being underwater.
Why this pairing: lighting is the single biggest driver of how “underwater” a scene feels — more than geometry detail.
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9.

PRELIMINARY TECH STACK
What we're building it with
C++17
OpenGL 4.x (Core)
GLFW
GLAD
Core language
Graphics API
Windowing & input
Function loader
GLM
stb_image
CMake
Git / GitHub
Math library
Texture loading
Build system
Version control
Shading language: GLSL · Shipped as a Visual Studio / CMake project buildable on the TA machine, per course requirements.
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10.

TIMELINE
Milestones through the semester
Week 5 — Today
Week 7
Finals Week
Proposal & Prototype
Feature-Complete Beta
Demo & Report
Problem statement, objectives, prelim tech
stack, plus a basic rendering loop with one
working feature.
Lighting/texturing and interaction in place:
caustics shader, procedural coral, and freefly camera all working together.
Live 3–6 minute demo, buildable code
repository, and the written report using
the course template.
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11.

TEAM
Who's building the reef
Timur
Zangar
Nurkhan
Nurbolat
Rendering & Pipeline Lead
Lighting & Shaders
Procedural Systems
Interaction & Integration
Blinn-Phong shading, caustics effect
Coral placement algorithm, instancing
Controls, UX polish, build & integration
Scene graph, transform pipeline,
camera system
Roles cover primary focus areas; all four collaborate across the rendering pipeline day to day.
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12.

Thank You
Questions & feedback are welcome.
Timur · Zangar · Nurkhan · Nurbolat