SPH Based Shallow Water Simulation

Abstract

We present an efficient method that uses particles to solve the 2D shallow water equations. These equations describe the dynamics of a body of water represented by a height field. Instead of storing the surface heights using uniform grid cells, we discretize the fluid with 2D SPH particles and compute the height according to the density at each particle location. The particle discretization offers the benefits that it simplifies the use of sparsely filled domains and arbitrary boundary geometry. Our solver can handle terrain slopes and supports two-way coupling of the particle-based height field with rigid objects. An improved surface definition is presented that reduces visible bumps related to the underlying particle representation. It furthermore smoothes areas with separating particles to achieve better rendering results. Both the physics and the rendering are implemented on modern GPUs resulting in interactive performances in all our presented examples.