Nils Thürey

Wavelet turbulence for fluid simulation

We present a novel wavelet method for the simulation of fluids at high spatial resolution. The algorithm enables large- and small-scale detail to be edited separately, allowing high-resolution detail to be added as a post-processing step. Instead of solving the Navier-Stokes equations over a highly refined mesh, we use the wavelet decomposition of a low-resolution simulation to determine the location and energy characteristics of missing high-frequency components. We then synthesize these missing components using a novel incompressible turbulence function, and provide a method to maintain the temporal coherence of the resulting structures. There is no linear system to solve, so the method parallelizes trivially and requires only a few auxiliary arrays. The method guarantees that the new frequencies will not interfere with existing frequencies, allowing animators to set up a low resolution simulation quickly and later add details without changing the overall fluid motion.

Deforming meshes that split and merge

We present a method for accurately tracking the moving surface of deformable materials in a manner that gracefully handles topological changes. We employ a Lagrangian surface tracking method, and we use a triangle mesh for our surface representation so that fine features can be retained. We make topological changes to the mesh by first identifying merging or splitting events at a particular grid resolution, and then locally creating new pieces of the mesh in the affected cells using a standard isosurface creation method. We stitch the new, topologically simplified portion of the mesh to the rest of the mesh at the cell boundaries. Our method detects and treats topological events with an emphasis on the preservation of detailed features, while simultaneously simplifying those portions of the material that are not visible. Our surface tracker is not tied to a particular method for simulating deformable materials. In particular, we show results from two significantly different simulators: a Lagrangian FEM simulator with tetrahedral elements, and an Eulerian grid-based fluid simulator. Although our surface tracking method is generic, it is particularly well-suited for simulations that exhibit fine surface details and numerous topological events. Highlights of our results include merging of viscoplastic materials with complex geometry, a taffy-pulling animation with many fold and merge events, and stretching and slicing of stiff plastic material.

A multiscale approach to mesh-based surface tension flows

We present an approach to simulate flows driven by surface tension based on triangle meshes. Our method consists of two simulation layers: the first layer is an Eulerian method for simulating surface tension forces that is free from typical strict time step constraints. The second simulation layer is a Lagrangian finite element method that simulates sub-grid scale wave details on the fluid surface. The surface wave simulation employs an unconditionally stable, symplectic time integration method that allows for a high propagation speed due to strong surface tension. Our approach can naturally separate the grid- and sub-grid scales based on a volume-preserving mean curvature flow. As our model for the sub-grid dynamics enforces a local conservation of mass, it leads to realistic pinch off and merging effects. In addition to this method for simulating dynamic surface tension effects, we also present an efficient non-oscillatory approximation for capturing damped surface tension behavior. These approaches allow us to efficiently simulate complex phenomena associated with strong surface tension, such as Rayleigh-Plateau instabilities and crown splashes, in a short amount of time.

Highly adaptive liquid simulations on tetrahedral meshes

We introduce a new method for efficiently simulating liquid with extreme amounts of spatial adaptivity. Our method combines several key components to drastically speed up the simulation of large-scale fluid phenomena: We leverage an alternative Eulerian tetrahedral mesh discretization to significantly reduce the complexity of the pressure solve while increasing the robustness with respect to element quality and removing the possibility of locking. Next, we enable subtle free-surface phenomena by deriving novel second-order boundary conditions consistent with our discretization. We couple this discretization with a spatially adaptive Fluid-Implicit Particle (FLIP) method, enabling efficient, robust, minimally-dissipative simulations that can undergo sharp changes in spatial resolution while minimizing artifacts. Along the way, we provide a new method for generating a smooth and detailed surface from a set of particles with variable sizes. Finally, we explore several new sizing functions for determining spatially adaptive simulation resolutions, and we show how to couple them to our simulator. We combine each of these elements to produce a simulation algorithm that is capable of creating animations at high maximum resolutions while avoiding common pitfalls like inaccurate boundary conditions and inefficient computation.

Physics-inspired topology changes for thin fluid features

We propose a mesh-based surface tracking method for fluid animation that both preserves fine surface details and robustly adjusts the topology of the surface in the presence of arbitrarily thin features like sheets and strands. We replace traditional re-sampling methods with a convex hull method for connecting surface features during topological changes. This technique permits arbitrarily thin fluid features with minimal re-sampling errors by reusing points from the original surface. We further reduce re-sampling artifacts with a subdivision-based mesh-stitching algorithm, and we use a higher order interpolating subdivision scheme to determine the location of any newly-created vertices. The resulting algorithm efficiently produces detailed fluid surfaces with arbitrarily thin features while maintaining a consistent topology with the underlying fluid simulation.

Real-time simulations of bubbles and foam within a shallow water framework

Bubbles and foam are important fluid phenomena on scales that we encounter in our lives every day. While different techniques to handle these effects were developed in the past years, they require a full 3D fluid solver with free surfaces and surface tension. We present a shallow water based particle model that is coupled with a smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulation to demonstrate that real-time simulations of bubble and foam effects are possible with high frame rates. A shallow water simulation is used to represent the overall water volume. It is coupled to a particle-based bubble simulation with a flow field of spherical vortices. This bubble simulation is interacting with a smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulation including surface tension to handle foam on the fluid surface. The realism and performance of our approach is demonstrated with several test cases that run with high frame rates on a standard PC.

Real-time Breaking Waves for Shallow Water Simulations

We present a new method for enhancing shallow water simulations by the effect of overturning waves. While full 3D fluid simulations can capture the process of wave breaking, this is beyond the capabilities of a pure height field model. 3D simulations, however, are still too expensive for real-time applications, especially when large bodies of water need to be simulated. The extension we propose overcomes this problem and makes it possible to simulate scenes such as waves near a beach, and surf riding characters in real-time. In a first step, steep wave fronts in the height field are detected and marked by line segments. These segments then spawn sheets of fluid represented by connected particles. When the sheets impinge on the water surface, they are absorbed and result in the creation of particles representing drops and foam. To enable interesting applications, we furthermore present a two-way coupling of rigid bodies with the fluid simulation. The capabilities and efficiency of the method will be demonstrated with several scenes, which run in real-time on todays commodity hardware.Animations of two avatars tangled with each other often appear in battle or fighting scenes in movies or games. However, creating such scenes is difficult due to the limitations of the tracking devices and the complex interactions of the avatars during such motions. In this paper, we propose a new method to generate animations of two persons tangled with each other based on individually captured motions. We use wrestling as an example. The inputs to the system are two individually captured motions and the topological relationship of the two avatars computed using Gauss Linking Integral (GLI). Then the system edits the captured motions so that they satisfy the given topological relationship. Using our method, it is possible to create / edit close-contact motions with minimum effort by the animators. The method can be used not only for wrestling, but also for any movement that requires the body to be tangled with others, such as holding a shoulder of an elderly to walk or a soldier piggy-backing another injured soldier.

Parallel Lattice Boltzmann Methods for CFD Applications

The lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) has evolved to a promising alternative to the well-established methods based on finite elements/volumes for computational fluid dynamics simulations. Ease of implementation, extensibility, and computational efficiency are the major reasons for LBM’s growing field of application and increasing popularity. In this paper we give a brief introduction to the involved theory and equations for LBM, present various techniques to increase the single-CPU performance, outline the parallelization of a standard LBM implementation, and show performance results. In order to demonstrate the straightforward extensibility of LBM, we then focus on an application in material science involving fluid flows with free surfaces. We discuss the required extensions to handle this complex scenario, and the impact on the parallelization technique.

Animation of open water phenomena with coupled shallow water and free surface simulations

The goal of this paper is to perform simulations that capture fluid effects from small drops up to the propagation of large waves. To achieve this, we present a hybrid simulation method, that couples a two-dimensional shallow water simulation with a full three-dimensional free surface fluid simulation. We explain the approximations imposed by the shallow water model, and how to parametrize it according to the parameters of a 3D simulation. Each simulation is used to initialize double layered boundary conditions for the other one. The area covered by the 2D region can be an order of magnitude larger than the 3D region without significantly effecting the overall computation time. The 3D region can furthermore be easily moved within the 2D region during the course of the simulation. To achieve realistic results we combine our simulation method with a physically based model to generate and animate drops. For their generation we make use of the fluid turbulence model, and animate them with a simplified drag calculation. This allows simulations with relatively low resolutions.

Preserving Fluid Sheets with Adaptively Sampled Anisotropic Particles

This paper presents a particle-based model for preserving fluid sheets of animated liquids with an adaptively sampled Fluid-Implicit-Particle (FLIP) method. In our method, we preserve fluid sheets by filling the breaking sheets with particle splitting in the thin regions, and by collapsing them in the deep water. To identify the critically thin parts, we compute the anisotropy of the particle neighborhoods, and use this information as a resampling criterion to reconstruct thin liquid surfaces. Unlike previous approaches, our method does not suffer from diffusive surfaces or complex remeshing operations, and robustly handles topology changes with the use of a meshless representation. We extend the underlying FLIP model with an anisotropic position correction to improve the particle spacing, and adaptive sampling to efficiently perform simulations of larger volumes. Due to the Lagrangian nature of our method, it can be easily implemented and efficiently parallelized. The results show that our method can produce visually complex liquid animations with thin structures and vivid motions.