Title
Liquid simulation on lattice-based tetrahedral meshes
Abstract
We describe a method for animating incompressible liquids with detailed free surfaces. For each time step, semi-Lagrangian contouring computes a new fluid boundary (represented as a fine surface triangulation) from the previous time step's fluid boundary and velocity field. Then a mesh generation algorithm called isosurface stuffing discretizes the region enclosed by the new fluid boundary, creating a tetrahedral mesh that grades from a fine resolution at the surface to a coarser resolution in the interior. The mesh has a structure, based on the body centered cubic lattice, that accommodates graded tetrahedron sizes but is regular enough to aid efficient point location and to save memory used to store geometric properties of identical tetrahedra. Although the mesh is warped to conform to the liquid boundary, it has a mathematical guarantee on tetrahedron quality, and is generated very rapidly. Each successive time step entails creating a new triangulated liquid surface and a new tetrahedral mesh. Semi-Lagrangian advection computes velocities at the current time step on the new mesh. We use a finite volume discretization to perform pressure projection required to enforce the fluid's incompressibility, and we solve the linear system with algebraic multigrid. A novel thickening scheme prevents thin sheets and droplets of liquid from vanishing when their thicknesses drop below the mesh resolution. Examples demonstrate that the method captures complex liquid motions and fine details on the free surfaces without suffering from excessive volume loss or artificial damping.
Year
DOI
Venue
2007
10.1145/1281740.1281819
Symposium on Computer Animation 2004
Keywords
Field
DocType
new tetrahedral mesh,fluid boundary,new fluid boundary,mesh generation algorithm,current time step,liquid simulation,natural phenomena,mesh resolution,new triangulated liquid surface,lattice-based tetrahedral mesh,computational fluid dynamics,tetrahedral mesh,complex liquid motion,physically based animation,new mesh,mesh generation,finite volume,body centered cubic,linear system,free surface,algebraic multigrid,point location,velocity field
Compressibility,Computer science,Surface triangulation,Isosurface,Physically based animation,Computational fluid dynamics,Geometry,Tetrahedron,Mesh generation,Multigrid method
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-59593-624-0
63
1.77
References 
Authors
32
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Nuttapong Chentanez167538.02
Bryan E. Feldman228611.51
François Labelle343915.87
James F. O'Brien43790247.44
Jonathan R. Shewchuk536212.83