A Simple Surface Tracking Method for Physically-Based 3D Water Simulations

Abstract

Water simulation, and more generically fluid simulation, is an important research topic in computer graphics. In 3D Eulerian Navier-Stokes-based water simulations, surface tracking and rendering are two delicate problems. The existing solutions to these problems (i.e., implicit surfaces-based approaches, height-fields, ray-tracing), are either to computationally intensive for real-time scenarios, or present bulge water surfaces (i.e., blobby water surfaces). In this paper, we propose a novel tracking algorithm for rendering water surfaces. Instead of tracking the flow of water using either level sets or height-fields, each cell of an 3D grid density value is directly measured in order to determine if it is either water, air, or water-air contact surface. The information in each cell is later used for the water surface splat rendering, using OpenGL vertex buffer objects.