Visual Simulation of Ice Crystal Growth

Abstract

The beautiful, branching structure of ice is one of the most striking visual phenomena of the winter landscape. Yet there is little study about modeling this effect in computer graphics. In this paper, we present a novel approach for visual simulation of ice growth. We use a numerical simulation technique from computational physics, the "phase field method", and modify it to allow aesthetic manipulation of ice crystal growth. We present acceleration techniques to achieve interactive simulation performance, as well as a novel geometric sharpening algorithm that removes some of the smoothing artifacts from the implicit representation. We have successfully applied this approach to generate ice crystal growth on 3D object surfaces in several scenes.