Real-Time Rendering of Flow of Water Drops on a Windshield
Yuu Goto, Tosimitu Tanaka, Yuzi Sagawa · IEEJ Transactions on Electronics Information and Systems · 2009
This research presents a method to display realistic flow of water drops on windshield in real time. The grid system well simulates irregular movements of the water drops on glass surfaces. Realistic shape of the water drops can be displayed by combination of metaballs. Fusion and separation of water drops can be expressed by gathering and distancing metaballs, respectively. However, if windscreen wipers scoop many metaballs in one cell of the mesh, they fuse to one huge water drop. It is very strange. On the other hand, the particle system is suitable to display thin dollop of water along windscreen wipers, because particles push each other. Thus, by the distance from the wipers, our method selects one from those two methods properly. Although shapes of the water drops are defined with 2D metaballs, quality of the shapes is comparable to 3D metaballs, both in nature and smoothness, because our method compresses height of the 2D metaballs non-linearly. Our method can manipulate and render water drops on windshield in real-time by using GPU.