Fast and Robust Tracking of Fluid Surfaces

Abstract

Surface tracking is an important problem with applications in many research fields. Among the most famous examples in computer graphics is the simulation and rendering of liquids with free surfaces. A surface that is advected by a general velocity field constantly changes its topology. This is the main reason why moving surfaces are typically defined implicitly as the zero set of a scalar field rather than by an explicit representation such as a mesh for instance. In this paper we present a method for tracking fluid surfaces using triangle meshes. This is done in two steps. First, the vertices are advected by the velocity field of the fluid. Second, self-penetrations are fixed using marching cubes triangle templates. The technique is efficient in terms of computation and memory consumption, it is simple to implement and allows for direct control of volume and feature preservation.