Dynamic explicit surface meshes and applications
Tyson Brochu · 2012
Explicit surface tracking encompasses the discretization of moving surfaces in 3D with triangle meshes. This thesis presents key contributions towards making explicit surface tracking tractable. I first deal with the topology change problem (the merging and splitting of mesh surfaces), introducing a framework for guaranteeing intersection-free surfaces while handling these topological changes. I then introduce new methods for continuous collision detection which are “exact” in the sense of returning the same results as they would if computed with symbolic or exact arithmetic, but which are implemented using faster, floating-point arithmetic. The thesis also showcases several application domains in which explicit surface tracking can offer improvements over traditional methods: geometric flows, adaptive cloth simulation, and passive visualization of smoke simulation. It also presents two simulation techniques which take advantage of the explicit surface mesh representation and would not be possible with traditional methods: vortex sheet smoke and adaptive liquid simulation with high-resolution surface tension.