PDE-Based Multidimensional Extrapolation of Scalar Fields over Interfaces with Kinks and High Curvatures

We present a PDE-based approach for the multidimensional extrapolation of smooth scalar quantities across interfaces with kinks and regions of high curvature. Unlike the commonly used method of [2] in which normal derivatives are extrapolated, the proposed approach is based on the extrapolation and weighting of Cartesian derivatives. As a result, second- and third-order accurate extensions in the $L^\infty$ norm are obtained with linear and quadratic extrapolations, respectively, even in the presence of sharp geometric features. The accuracy of the method is demonstrated on a number of examples in two and three spatial dimensions and compared to the approach of [2]. The importance of accurate extrapolation near sharp geometric features is highlighted on an example of solving the diffusion equation on evolving domains.Comment: 17 pages, 13 figures, submitted to SIAM Journal of Scientific Computin

Variational Stokes: A Unified Pressure-viscosity Solver for Accurate Viscous Liquids

© ACM, 2017. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Larionov, E., Batty, C., & Bridson, R. (2017). Variational Stokes: A Unified Pressure-viscosity Solver for Accurate Viscous Liquids. ACM Trans. Graph., 36(4), 101:1–101:11. https://doi.org/10.1145/3072959.3073628We propose a novel unsteady Stokes solver for coupled viscous and pressure forces in grid-based liquid animation which yields greater accuracy and visual realism than previously achieved. Modern fluid simulators treat viscosity and pressure in separate solver stages, which reduces accuracy and yields incorrect free surface behavior. Our proposed implicit variational formulation of the Stokes problem leads to a symmetric positive definite linear system that gives properly coupled forces, provides unconditional stability, and treats difficult boundary conditions naturally through simple volume weights. Surface tension and moving solid boundaries are also easily incorporated. Qualitatively, we show that our method recovers the characteristic rope coiling instability of viscous liquids and preserves fine surface details, while previous grid-based schemes do not. Quantitatively, we demonstrate that our method is convergent through grid refinement studies on analytical problems in two dimensions. We conclude by offering practical guidelines for choosing an appropriate viscous solver, based on the scenario to be animated and the computational costs of different methods.Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canad

Rigid Body Interaction for Large-Scale Real-Time Water Simulation

Simulating large amounts of water in real time is often achieved using heightfield methods. Allowing the water to interact with rigid bodies is essential for applications such as games, but traditional heightfield interaction methods concentrate on water-to-body effects by letting water flow through the bodies. We instead take an approach where the bodies block water. Our earlier method is improved in several ways, taking steps toward a single method to create both water-to-body and body-to-water effects. The new method is also visually compared to a traditional method by Thürey et al. A drawback of our method is that it has some grid aliasing artifacts that appear especially when the method is used for floating bodies. However, our method is demonstrated to work together with the Thürey method, which allows us to get the best of both worlds to simulate both floating and blocking bodies in a single scene. The method runs in real time for large areas of water even with a very limited GPU budget

Preserving Geometry and Topology for Fluid Flows with Thin Obstacles and Narrow Gaps

© ACM, 2016. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Azevedo, V. C., Batty, C., & Oliveira, M. M. (2016). Preserving Geometry and Topology for Fluid Flows with Thin Obstacles and Narrow Gaps. Acm Transactions on Graphics, 35(4), 97. https://doi.org/10.1145/2897824.292591Fluid animation methods based on Eulerian grids have long struggled to resolve flows involving narrow gaps and thin solid features. Past approaches have artificially inflated or voxelized boundaries, although this sacrifices the correct geometry and topology of the fluid domain and prevents flow through narrow regions. We present a boundary-respecting fluid simulator that overcomes these challenges. Our solution is to intersect the solid boundary geometry with the cells of a background regular grid to generate a topologically correct, boundary-conforming cut-cell mesh. We extend both pressure projection and velocity advection to support this enhanced grid structure. For pressure projection, we introduce a general graph-based scheme that properly preserves discrete incompressibility even in thin and topologically complex flow regions, while nevertheless yielding symmetric positive definite linear systems. For advection, we exploit polyhedral interpolation to improve the degree to which the flow conforms to irregular and possibly non-convex cell boundaries, and propose a modified PIC/FLIP advection scheme to eliminate the need to inaccurately reinitialize invalid cells that are swept over by moving boundaries. The method naturally extends the standard Eulerian fluid simulation framework, and while we focus on thin boundaries, our contributions are beneficial for volumetric solids as well. Our results demonstrate successful one-way fluid-solid coupling in the presence of thin objects and narrow flow regions even on very coarse grids.Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canad

Constraint bubbles and affine regions: reduced fluid models for efficient immersed bubbles and flexible spatial coarsening

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]. © 2020 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. 0730-0301/2020/7-ART43 $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3386569.3392455We propose to enhance the capability of standard free-surface flow simulators with efficient support for immersed bubbles through two new models: constraint-based bubbles and affine fluid regions. Unlike its predecessors, our constraint-based model entirely dispenses with the need for advection or projection inside zero-density bubbles, with extremely modest additional computational overhead that is proportional to the surface area of all bubbles. This surface-only approach is easy to implement, realistically captures many familiar bubble behaviors, and even allows two or more distinct liquid bodies to correctly interact across completely unsimulated air. We augment this model with a per-bubble volume-tracking and correction framework to minimize the cumulative effects of gradual volume drift. To support bubbles with non-zero densities, we propose a novel reduced model for an irregular fluid region with a single pointwise incompressible affine vector field. This model requires only 11 interior velocity degrees of freedom per affine fluid region in 3D, and correctly reproduces buoyant, stationary, and sinking behaviors of a secondary fluid phase with non-zero density immersed in water. Since the pressure projection step in both the above schemes is a slightly modified Poisson-style system, we propose novel Multigrid-based preconditioners for Conjugate Gradients for fast numerical solutions of our new discretizations. Furthermore, we observe that by enforcing an incompressible affine vector field over a coalesced set of grid cells, our reduced model is effectively an irregular coarse super-cell. This offers a convenient and flexible adaptive coarsening strategy that integrates readily with the standard staggered grid approach for fluid simulation, yet supports coarsened regions that are arbitrary voxelized shapes, and provides an analytically divergence-free interior. We demonstrate its effectiveness with a new adaptive liquid simulator whose interior regions are coarsened into a mix of tiles with regular and irregular shapes.This work was supported in part by the Natural Sciences and En- gineering Research Council of Canada (RGPIN-04360-2014), the Rutgers University start-up grant, and the Ralph E. Powe Junior Fac- ulty Enhancement Award. We would like to thank Cristin Barghiel and SideFX for their generous software donation and Ryoichi Ando for his insightful discussion on comparing our constraint method with stream functions

A Multi-scale Model for Simulating Liquid-hair Interactions

© ACM, 2017. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Fei, Y. (Raymond), Maia, H. T., Batty, C., Zheng, C., & Grinspun, E. (2017). A Multi-scale Model for Simulating Liquid-hair Interactions. ACM Trans. Graph., 36(4), 56:1–56:17. https://doi.org/10.1145/3072959.3073630The diverse interactions between hair and liquid are complex and span multiple length scales, yet are central to the appearance of humans and animals in many situations. We therefore propose a novel multi-component simulation framework that treats many of the key physical mechanisms governing the dynamics of wet hair. The foundations of our approach are a discrete rod model for hair and a particle-in-cell model for fluids. To treat the thin layer of liquid that clings to the hair, we augment each hair strand with a height field representation. Our contribution is to develop the necessary physical and numerical models to evolve this new system and the interactions among its components. We develop a new reduced-dimensional liquid model to solve the motion of the liquid along the length of each hair, while accounting for its moving reference frame and influence on the hair dynamics. We derive a faithful model for surface tension-induced cohesion effects between adjacent hairs, based on the geometry of the liquid bridges that connect them. We adopt an empirically-validated drag model to treat the effects of coarse-scale interactions between hair and surrounding fluid, and propose new volume-conserving dripping and absorption strategies to transfer liquid between the reduced and particle-in-cell liquid representations. The synthesis of these techniques yields an effective wet hair simulator, which we use to animate hair flipping, an animal shaking itself dry, a spinning car wash roller brush dunked in liquid, and intricate hair coalescence effects, among several additional scenarios.Graduate Student Research FellowshipNational Science FoundationNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canad