Visual
Computing

Liquid Surface Tracking with Error Compensation

Without our method
Without our method (zoom)
With our method
With our method (zoom)
Our method permits high-resolution tracking of a low-resolution fluid simulation. Due to the resolution mismatch, the original simulation (top) exhibits both surface noise in the form of wrinkles and banding, and topological noise in the form of holes and gashes. Our method removes such unphysical features while preserving desirable physically-consistent details through strategically places surface waves (bottom). The right shows a close-up of the bottom right corner of the simulation.

Authors

Affiliations

Publication

ACM Transactions on Graphics 32(4) (SIGGRAPH 2013)

Abstract

Our work concerns the combination of an Eulerian liquid simulation with a high-resolution surface tracker (e.g. the level set method or a Lagrangian triangle mesh). The naive application of a high-resolution surface tracker to a low-resolution velocity field can produce many visually disturbing physical and topological artifacts that limit their use in practice. We address these problems by defining an error function which compares the current state of the surface tracker to the set of physically valid surface states. By reducing this error with a gradient descent technique, we introduce a novel physics-based surface fairing method. Similarly, by treating this error function as a potential energy, we derive a new surface correction force that mimics the vortex sheet equations. We demonstrate our results with both level set and mesh-based surface trackers.

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Citation

@article{LSTwEC2013,
author = {Morten Bojsen-Hansen and Chris Wojtan},
title = {Liquid Surface Tracking with Error Compensation},
journal = {ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2013)},
year = {2013},
volume = {32},
number = {4},
pages = {79:1--79:10}
}

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Keenan Crane for helpful discussions about energy gradients, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback on our work.