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A model for real-time on-surface flows

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Abstract

Simulating fluid flows for visualization purposes is known to be one of the most challenging fields of the computer graphics domain. While rendering vast liquid areas has been widely addressed this last decade, few papers have tackled the problematic of on-surface flows, even though real-time applications such as drive simulators or video games could greatly benefit from such methods. We present a novel empirical method for the animation of liquid droplets lying on a flat surface, the core of our technique being a simulation operating on a 2D grid which is implementable on GPU. The wetted surface can freely be oriented in space and is not limited to translucent materials, the liquid flow being governed by external forces, the viscosity parameter and the presence of obstacles. Furthermore, we show how to simply incorporate in our simulation scheme two enriching visual effects, namely absorption and ink transport. Rendering can be achieved from an arbitrary view point using a GPU image based raycasting approach and takes into account the refraction and reflection of light. Even though our method doesn’t benefit from the literature of fluid mechanics, we show that convincing animations in terms of realism can be achieved in real-time.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. XLIM, University of Limoges, Limoges, France

    Jean-François El Hajjar, Vincent Jolivet & Djamchid Ghazanfarpour

  2. IIiA, Universitat de Girona, Girona, Spain

    Xavier Pueyo

Authors
  1. Jean-François El Hajjar
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  2. Vincent Jolivet
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  3. Djamchid Ghazanfarpour
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  4. Xavier Pueyo
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Correspondence to Jean-François El Hajjar.

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El Hajjar, JF., Jolivet, V., Ghazanfarpour, D. et al. A model for real-time on-surface flows. Vis Comput 25, 87–100 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-007-0207-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-007-0207-7

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