Transport-Based Neural Style Transfer for Smoke Simulations

Artistically controlling fluids has always been a challenging task. Optimization techniques rely on approximating simulation states towards target velocity or density field configurations, which are often handcrafted by artists to indirectly control smoke dynamics. Patch synthesis techniques transfer image textures or simulation features to a target flow field. However, these are either limited to adding structural patterns or augmenting coarse flows with turbulent structures, and hence cannot capture the full spectrum of different styles and semantically complex structures. In this paper, we propose the first Transport-based Neural Style Transfer (TNST) algorithm for volumetric smoke data. Our method is able to transfer features from natural images to smoke simulations, enabling general content-aware manipulations ranging from simple patterns to intricate motifs. The proposed algorithm is physically inspired, since it computes the density transport from a source input smoke to a desired target configuration. Our transport-based approach allows direct control over the divergence of the stylization velocity field by optimizing incompressible and irrotational potentials that transport smoke towards stylization. Temporal consistency is ensured by transporting and aligning subsequent stylized velocities, and 3D reconstructions are computed by seamlessly merging stylizations from different camera viewpoints.Comment: ACM Transaction on Graphics (SIGGRAPH ASIA 2019), additional materials: http://www.byungsoo.me/project/neural-flow-styl

Controlling Melting Phase Change Simulations

I have developed a set of Houdini Digital Assets (HDA) to control phase change in materials that melt. Examples of real world materials that exhibit these phenomena include melting candles, molten steel, etc. The purpose of this tool is to provide artistic user control when animating these materials. The user can provide an object model as an input to the HDA, which can then be split into multiple sections as per the user’s needs. The user can then specify attributes such as temperature, viscosity, and a melting rate for each section. The object is then filled with particles to resemble a particle based fluid object, with each particle inheriting the attributes of the section it belongs to. When the simulation is run, two conditions control the behavior of the phase change at each timestep. First, the particles melt only at the rate specified for their section. Second, the particles from one section do not mix with those from another section. These conditions are implemented using custom digital assets in Houdini that I developed. Once the simulation is complete, the user is able to combine the deformed meshes of each section into a unified animated mesh and proceed with shading, lighting, and rendering

Reviews on Physically Based Controllable Fluid Animation

In computer graphics animation, animation tools are required for fluid-like motions which are controllable by users or animator, since applying the techniques to commercial animations such as advertisement and film. Many developments have been proposed to model controllable fluid simulation with the need in realistic motion, robustness, adaptation, and support more required control model. Physically based models for different states of substances have been applied in general in order to permit animators to almost effortlessly create interesting, realistic, and sensible animation of natural phenomena such as water flow, smoke spread, etc. In this paper, we introduce the methods for simulation based on physical model and the techniques for control the flow of fluid, especially focus on particle based method. We then discuss the existing control methods within three performances; control ability, realism, and computation time. Finally, we give a brief of the current and trend of the research areas

Visual Simulation of Flow

We have adopted a numerical method from computational fluid dynamics, the Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM), for real-time simulation and visualization of flow and amorphous phenomena, such as clouds, smoke, fire, haze, dust, radioactive plumes, and air-borne biological or chemical agents. Unlike other approaches, LBM discretizes the micro-physics of local interactions and can handle very complex boundary conditions, such as deep urban canyons, curved walls, indoors, and dynamic boundaries of moving objects. Due to its discrete nature, LBM lends itself to multi-resolution approaches, and its computational pattern, which is similar to cellular automata, is easily parallelizable. We have accelerated LBM on commodity graphics processing units (GPUs), achieving real-time or even accelerated real-time on a single GPU or on a GPU cluster. We have implemented a 3D urban navigation system and applied it in New York City with real-time live sensor data. In addition to a pivotal application in simulation of airborne contaminants in urban environments, this approach will enable the development of other superior prediction simulation capabilities, computer graphics and games, and a novel technology for computational science and engineering

Controlling Melting Phase Change Simulations

I have developed a set of Houdini Digital Assets (HDA) to control phase change in materials that melt. Examples of real world materials that exhibit these phenomena include melting candles, molten steel, etc. The purpose of this tool is to provide artistic user control when animating these materials. The user can provide an object model as an input to the HDA, which can then be split into multiple sections as per the user’s needs. The user can then specify attributes such as temperature, viscosity, and a melting rate for each section. The object is then filled with particles to resemble a particle based fluid object, with each particle inheriting the attributes of the section it belongs to. When the simulation is run, two conditions control the behavior of the phase change at each timestep. First, the particles melt only at the rate specified for their section. Second, the particles from one section do not mix with those from another section. These conditions are implemented using custom digital assets in Houdini that I developed. Once the simulation is complete, the user is able to combine the deformed meshes of each section into a unified animated mesh and proceed with shading, lighting, and rendering

Controlling liquids using meshes

We present an approach for artist-directed animation of liquids using multiple levels of control over the simulation, ranging from the overall tracking of desired shapes to highly detailed secondary effects such as dripping streams, separating sheets of fluid, surface waves and ripples. The first portion of our technique is a volume preserving morph that allows the animator to produce a plausible fluid-like motion from a sparse set of control meshes. By rasterizing the resulting control meshes onto the simulation grid, the mesh velocities act as boundary conditions during the projection step of the fluid simulation. We can then blend this motion together with uncontrolled fluid velocities to achieve a more relaxed control over the fluid that captures natural inertial effects. Our method can produce highly detailed liquid surfaces with control over sub-grid details by using a mesh-based surface tracker on top of a coarse grid-based fluid simulation. We can create ripples and waves on the fluid surface attracting the surface mesh to the control mesh with spring-like forces and also by running a wave simulation over the surface mesh. Our video results demonstrate how our control scheme can be used to create animated characters and shapes that are made of water

A simple finite volume method for adaptive viscous liquids

© Christopher Batty & Ben Houston | ACM 2011. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in SCA '11: Proceedings of the 2011 ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2019406.2019421We present the first spatially adaptive Eulerian fluid animation method to support challenging viscous liquid effects such as folding, coiling, and variable viscosity. We propose a tetrahedral node-based embedded finite volume method for fluid viscosity, adapted from popular techniques for Lagrangian deformable objects. Applied in an Eulerian fashion with implicit integration, this scheme stably and efficiently supports high viscosity fluids while yielding symmetric positive definite linear systems. To integrate this scheme into standard tetrahedral mesh-based fluid simulators, which store normal velocities on faces rather than velocity vectors at nodes, we offer two methods to reconcile these representations. The first incorporates a mapping between different degrees of freedom into the viscosity solve itself. The second uses a FLIP-like approach to transfer velocity data between nodes and faces before and after the linear solve. The former offers tighter coupling by enabling the linear solver to act directly on the face velocities of the staggered mesh, while the latter provides a sparser linear system and a simpler implementation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with animations of spatially varying viscosity, realistic rotational motion, and viscous liquid buckling and coiling

Procedural modeling of water caustics and foamy water for cartoon animation

We propose a method for procedural modeling and animation of cartoon water effects such as water caustics and foamy water. In our method we emulate the visual abstraction of these cartoon effects by the use of Voronoi diagrams and the motion abstraction by designing relevant controlling mechanisms corresponding to each effect. Our system enables the creation of cartoon effects with minimal intervention from the animator. Through high-level initial specification, the effects are animated procedurally in the style of hand-drawn cartoons. © 2010 IEEE

Discrete viscous sheets

© Christopher Batty, Andres Uribe, Basile Audoly, Eitan Grinspun | ACM 2012. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in ACM Transactions on Graphics, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2185520.2185609.We present the first reduced-dimensional technique to simulate the dynamics of thin sheets of viscous incompressible liquid in three dimensions. Beginning from a discrete Lagrangian model for elastic thin shells, we apply the Stokes-Rayleigh analogy to derive a simple yet consistent model for viscous forces. We incorporate nonlinear surface tension forces with a formulation based on minimizing discrete surface area, and preserve the quality of triangular mesh elements through local remeshing operations. Simultaneously, we track and evolve the thickness of each triangle to exactly conserve liquid volume. This approach enables the simulation of extremely thin sheets of viscous liquids, which are difficult to animate with existing volumetric approaches. We demonstrate our method with examples of several characteristic viscous sheet behaviors, including stretching, buckling, sagging, and wrinkling.This research is supported in part by the Sloan Foundation, the NSF (grants CMMI-11-29917, IIS-11-17257, IIS-10-48948, IIS- 09-16129, CCF-06-43268), and generous gifts from Adobe, Au- todesk, Intel, mental images, NVIDIA, Side Effects Software, and The Walt Disney Company. The first author is supported by a Bant- ing Postdoctoral Fellowship