Boundary Detection in Particle-based Fluids

Abstract

This paper presents a novel method to detect free-surfaces on particle-based volume representation. In contrast to most particlebased free-surface detection methods, which perform the surface identification based on physical and geometrical properties derived from the underlying fluid flow simulation, the proposed approach only demands the spatial location of the particles to properly recognize surface particles, avoiding even the use of kernels. Boundary particles are identified through a Hidden Point Removal (HPR) operator used for visibility test. Our method is very simple, fast, easy to implement and robust to changes in the distribution of particles, even when facing large deformation of the free-surface. A set of comparisons against state-of-the-art boundary detection methods show the effectiveness of our approach. The good performance of our method is also attested in the context of fluid flow simulation involving free-surface, mainly when using level-sets for rendering purposes.