Procedural fluid textures
Sean C McDuffee, Maurice van Swaijj · 2018
We present an efficient system for synthesizing textures over fluid surfaces in a solid texturing context. The technique is simple and intuitive for artists using modern, commercially available fluid simulators. Instead of working with 2D surface maps like other fluid texture synthesis approaches, we advect 3D reference space transforms with the fluid simulation. The reference transforms are then projected onto the final surface mesh with a radius of influence control, and used for solid texturing lookup. Ray intersections of the fluid surface interpolate any transforms with overlapping control radii to determine the reference lookup of the solid texture. The final texture exhibits excellent spatial and temporal coherence with none of the artifacts that plagued previous map based approaches.