Fluid animation with explicit surface meshes and boundary-only dynamics
Tyson Brochu · 2010
An explicit method for fluid surface tracking is presented. The method represents the surface as a triangulated mesh of points in space, rather than as an implicit surface function. Utilizing well-developed algorithms designed for collision detection and resolution in cloth simulation, the system is able to handle topology changes robustly and efficiently. When fluid surfaces collide, we perform topology changes only in the most trivial cases -- we reject any degenerate cases and use the cloth algorithm to keep the surfaces separated. Taking advantage of the explicit surface representation, we introduce new approaches to simulating surface tension and conserving fluid volume. Finally, we propose a boundary element method for enforcing fluid incompressibility which uses only data points on the fluid surface, rather than a full volumetric discretization of the fluid over a grid.