Interactive water streams with sphere scan conversion

Abstract

Figure 1: Interactive water simulation of 2500 particles at 75 fps with surface extraction by sphere scan conversion on the CPU and rendering of shadow and environment maps on the GPU. AbstractFluid simulations require efficient dynamics, surface extraction and rendering in order to achieve real time interaction. We present a novel technique for the surface extraction of stream-shaped fluid simulations represented as particles. Typical surface extraction methods for particles combine implicit function evaluation with the marching cubes algorithm. In our approach, we dynamically update vertex positions in pre-generated geometry to efficiently construct and render fluid surfaces. Cylinders are wrapped to water streams composed of particles, with simulation and polygonization on the CPU, and shadows and lighting on the GPU. While limited to stream-shaped fluids, our technique is significantly faster than marching cubes, scales well with resolution and number of particles and, unlike point-based rendering, produces true 3D polygonal surfaces.

Waterfall Simulation with Spray Cloud in different Environments

“…On the other hand, Takahashi et al proposed CIP (Cubic Interpolated Propagation) method to visualize the seamless connection between splash and foam [26]. Hoetzlein and Höllerer proposed a technique for extracting surface of falling water stream combined with many particles by using sphere scan conversion [27], and Miyashita and Funahashi proposed a real-time liquid manipulation model that handles water falling from a cup in a virtual space [28]. In addition, Nielsen and Østerby visualized water spray that appears in waterfalls, water jets, and stormy seas with Eulerian two-continua simulation of air and water [29].…”

Boundless Fluids Using the Lattice-Boltzmann Method

“…This grid can be easily computed, though, based on the bounding box of all particles in the simulation. Recently, Hoetzlein and Hollerer have also developed an alternative surface extraction method to Marching Cubes [31] that is based on wrapping cylinder surfaces around particle streams and shrinking them to fit the stream.…”