Figure 1: Many fluid phenomena consist of thin films and filaments. (Far Left) Film Catenoid: a membrane suspended between two rings contracts due to surface tension. (Middle Left) Fishbone: two colliding jets form a thin sheet, filaments, and droplets. This phenomena is named for its resemblance to a fish skeleton. (Middle Right) Waterbell: a jet of water striking an impactor results in a closed circular water sheet that resembles a bell. (Far Right) Paint Splash: a splash caused by a rock falling into a tank filled with layers of colored paint. AbstractMany visually interesting natural phenomena are characterized by thin liquid sheets, long filaments, and droplets. We present a new Lagrangian-based numerical method to simulate these codimensional surface tension driven phenomena using non-manifold simplicial complexes. Tetrahedra, triangles, segments, and points are used to model the fluid volume, thin films, filaments, and droplets, respectively. We present a new method for enforcing fluid incompressibility on simplicial complexes along with a physically-guided meshing algorithm to provide temporally consistent information for interparticle forces. Our method naturally allows for transitions between codimensions, either from tetrahedra to triangles to segments to points or vice versa, regardless of the simulation resolution. We demonstrate the efficacy of this method by simulating various natural phenomena that are characterized by thin fluid sheets, filaments, and surface tension effects.

We present a novel method to simulate codimensional nonNewtonian fluids on simplicial complexes. Our method extends previous work for codimensional incompressible flow to various types of non-Newtonian fluids including both shear thinning and thickening, Bingham plastics, and elastoplastics. We propose a novel time integration scheme for semi-implicitly treating elasticity, which when combined with a semi-implicit method for variable viscosity alleviates the need for small time steps. Furthermore, we propose an improved treatment of viscosity on the rims of thin fluid sheets that allows us to capture their elusive, visually appealing twisting motion. In order to simulate complex phenomena such as the mixing of colored paint, we adopt a multiple level set framework and propose a discretization on simplicial complexes that facilitates the tracking of material interfaces across codimensions. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach by simulating a wide variety of non-Newtonian fluid phenomena exhibiting various codimensional features.

We present a novel method for posing and animating botanical tree models interactively in real time. Unlike other state of the art methods which tend to produce trees that are overly flexible, bending and deforming as if they were underwater plants, our approach allows for arbitrarily high stiffness while still maintaining real-time frame rates without spurious artifacts, even on quite large trees with over ten thousand branches. This is accomplished by using an articulated rigid body model with as-stiff-as-desired rotational springs in conjunction with our newly proposed simulation technique, which is motivated both by position based dynamics and the typical algorithms for articulated rigid bodies. The efficiency of our algorithm allows us to pose and animate trees with millions of branches or alternatively simulate a small forest comprised of many highly detailed trees. Even using only a single CPU core, we can simulate ten thousand branches in real time while still maintaining quite crisp user interactivity. This has allowed us to incorporate our framework into a commodity game engine to run interactively even on a low-budget tablet. We show that our method is amenable to the incorporation of a large variety of desirable effects such as wind, leaves, fictitious forces, collisions, fracture, etc.

Figure 1: Ray Tracing Visualization Toolkit. An extensible GUI, together with a ray state recording library and a collection of visualization components, integrate existing client renderers via a flexible plug-in architecture to support visual analysis of ray-based rendering algorithms. Here, rtVTK is used to visually debug an ill-behaved path tracer. The previously undiscovered bug is not obvious in either a low-quality image with relatively few samples per pixel (top left) or a high-quality image with many more samples per pixel (bottom left). However, when viewing the ray state directly with rtVTK (middle, right), the problem is immediately obvious: some shadow rays originating from diffuse surfaces (circled) are not directed toward any light source in the scene. Once identified, the correction was trivial; however, in its previous state, the renderer was incorrect, and likely would have remained so without the ability to visualize the ray tracing process itself. AbstractThe Ray Tracing Visualization Toolkit (rtVTK) is a collection of programming and visualization tools supporting visual analysis of ray-based rendering algorithms. rtVTK leverages layered visualization within the spatial domain of computation, enabling investigators to explore the computational elements of any ray-based renderer. Renderers utilize a library for recording and processing ray state, and a configurable pipeline of loosely coupled components allows run-time control of the resulting visualization. rtVTK enhances tasks in development, education, and analysis by enabling users to interact with a visual representation of ray tracing computations.

We tackle the challenging problem of creating full and accurate three dimensional reconstructions of botanical trees with the topological and geometric accuracy required for subsequent physical simulation, e.g. in response to wind forces. Although certain aspects of our approach would benefit from various improvements, our results exceed the state of the art especially in geometric and topological complexity and accuracy. Starting with two dimensional RGB image data acquired from cameras attached to drones, we create point clouds, textured triangle meshes, and a simulatable and skinned cylindrical articulated rigid body model. We discuss the pros and cons of each step of our pipeline, and in order to stimulate future research we make the raw and processed data from every step of the pipeline as well as the final geometric reconstructions publicly available.