research-article

A material point method for snow simulation

Authors:

Alexey Stomakhin,

Craig Schroeder,

Andrew SelleAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), Volume 32, Issue 4

Article No.: 102, Pages 1 - 10

https://doi.org/10.1145/2461912.2461948

Published: 21 July 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Snow is a challenging natural phenomenon to visually simulate. While the graphics community has previously considered accumulation and rendering of snow, animation of snow dynamics has not been fully addressed. Additionally, existing techniques for solids and fluids have difficulty producing convincing snow results. Specifically, wet or dense snow that has both solid- and fluid-like properties is difficult to handle. Consequently, this paper presents a novel snow simulation method utilizing a user-controllable elasto-plastic constitutive model integrated with a hybrid Eulerian/Lagrangian Material Point Method. The method is continuum based and its hybrid nature allows us to use a regular Cartesian grid to automate treatment of self-collision and fracture. It also naturally allows us to derive a grid-based semi-implicit integration scheme that has conditioning independent of the number of Lagrangian particles. We demonstrate the power of our method with a variety of snow phenomena including complex character interactions.

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Index Terms

A material point method for snow simulation
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Computer graphics
    1. Animation
  2. Modeling and simulation
    1. Simulation types and techniques
      1. Simulation by animation

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cover image ACM Transactions on Graphics

ACM Transactions on Graphics Volume 32, Issue 4

July 2013

1215 pages

ISSN:0730-0301

EISSN:1557-7368

DOI:10.1145/2461912

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Copyright © 2013 ACM.

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Publication History

Published: 21 July 2013

Published in TOG Volume 32, Issue 4

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https://doi.org/10.3390/wevj16010047
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