Computer graphics is an extremely exciting field for two reasons. On the one hand,
there is a healthy injection of pragmatism coming from the visual effects industry
that want robust algorithms that work so they can produce results at an increasingly
frantic pace. On the other hand, they must always try to push the envelope and
achieve the impossible to wow their audiences in the next blockbuster, which means
that the industry has not succumb to conservatism, and there is plenty of room to
try out new and crazy ideas if there is a chance that it will pan into something
useful.
Water simulation has been in visual effects for decades, however it still remains
extremely challenging because of its high computational cost and difficult artdirectability.
The work in this thesis tries to address some of these difficulties.
Specifically, we make the following three novel contributions to the state-of-the-art
in water simulation for visual effects.
First, we develop the first algorithm that can convert any sequence of closed
surfaces in time into a moving triangle mesh. State-of-the-art methods at the time
could only handle surfaces with fixed connectivity, but we are the first to be able to
handle surfaces that merge and split apart. This is important for water simulation
practitioners, because it allows them to convert splashy water surfaces extracted
from particles or simulated using grid-based level sets into triangle meshes that can
be either textured and enhanced with extra surface dynamics as a post-process.
We also apply our algorithm to other phenomena that merge and split apart, such
as morphs and noisy reconstructions of human performances.
Second, we formulate a surface-based energy that measures the deviation of a
water surface froma physically valid state. Such discrepancies arise when there is a
mismatch in the degrees of freedom between the water surface and the underlying
physics solver. This commonly happens when practitioners use a moving triangle
mesh with a grid-based physics solver, or when high-resolution grid-based surfaces
are combined with low-resolution physics. Following the direction of steepest
descent on our surface-based energy, we can either smooth these artifacts or turn
them into high-resolution waves by interpreting the energy as a physical potential.
Third, we extend state-of-the-art techniques in non-reflecting boundaries to handle spatially and time-varying background flows. This allows a novel new
workflow where practitioners can re-simulate part of an existing simulation, such
as removing a solid obstacle, adding a new splash or locally changing the resolution.
Such changes can easily lead to new waves in the re-simulated region that would
reflect off of the new simulation boundary, effectively ruining the illusion of a
seamless simulation boundary between the existing and new simulations. Our
non-reflecting boundaries makes sure that such waves are absorbed
