A method of melting snow animation using mathematical morphology

Recently, computer graphics has been often used to express natural phenomena. In this study, we propose a new technique for representing the appearance of snow melting by a heat source in virtual space. The conventional methods focus on heat calculations from the source. However, these approaches do not consider that water refreezes after melting. In order to express the snow melting phenomenon with a high degree of realism, we introduce the Mathematical Morphology method to reduce the processing cost, and to consider that water infiltrates into the snow and freezes again. In addition, some experimental results show that images generated by this method are more realistic than conventional ones. Our method achieves the effect that the snow melts on the side facing the heat source, and that the hollow part of the snow is again filled by refreezing.