Efficient Refinement of Dynamic Point Data

Abstract

Particle simulations as well as geometric modeling techniques have demonstrated their ability to process and render points interactively. However, real-time particle-based fluid simulations suffer from poor rendering quality due to low surface particle resolutions. Surfaces appear blobby, surface details are lost, and features like edges are degraded due to smoothing effects. This paper presents a novel point refinement method for irregularly sampled, dynamic points coming from a particle-based fluid simulation. Our interpolation algorithm can handle complex geometries including splashes, and at the same time preserves features like edges. Point collisions are avoided resulting in a nearly uniform sampling facilitating surface reconstruction techniques. No point preprocessing is necessary, and point neighborhoods are dynamically updated reducing computation and memory costs. We show that our algorithm can efficiently detect and refine the surface points of a fluid and we demonstrate the improvement of rendering quality and applicability to real-time simulations.