A Survey on SPH Methods in Computer Graphics

Abstract

Throughout the past decades, the graphics community has spent major resources on the research and development of physics simulators on the mission to computer-generate behaviors achieving outstanding visual effects or to make the virtual world indistinguishable from reality. The variety and impact of recent research based on Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) demonstrates the concept's importance as one of the most versatile tools for the simulation of fluids and solids. With this survey, we offer an overview of the developments and still-active research on physics simulation methodologies based on SPH that has not been addressed in previous SPH surveys. Following an introduction about typical SPH discretization techniques, we provide an overview over the most used incompressibility solvers and present novel insights regarding their relation and conditional equivalence. The survey further covers recent advances in implicit and particle-based boundary handling and sampling techniques. While SPH is best known in the context of fluid simulation we discuss modern concepts to augment the range of simulatable physical characteristics including turbulence, highly viscous matter, deformable solids, as well as rigid body contact handling. Besides the purely numerical approaches, simulation techniques aided by machine learning are on the rise. Thus, the survey discusses recent data-driven approaches and the impact of differentiable solvers on artist control. Finally, we provide context for discussion by outlining existing problems and opportunities to open up new research directions.