Fast simulation and rendering techniques for fluid objects

Abstract

Movies with actions and light effects of fluid objects are aesthetically pleasing and interesting. Until now, the calculation costs of simulation and rendering of fluid objects have been very high. Using a modern PC system and appropriate methods, we achieved a time of 10-20 seconds per frame for this application. Our system uses a full Navier-Stokes equation solver with uniform Eulerian mesh, marching cube isosurface techniques, Catmull-Clark subdivision surface techniques, ray tracing techniques on each vertex and conventional polygon base rendering by HW accelerator. In this paper, we describe the components of our system and the reasons for choosing them. By measuring CPU times of each process for some movie scenes of fluid objects, we evaluate this system. We consider what factors are important for creating movies of fluid objects with short TAT.