Realistic Animation of Liquids

We present a comprehensive methodology for realistically animating liquid phenomena. Our approach unifies existing computer graphics techniques for simulating fluids and extends them by incorporating more complex behavior. It is based on the Navier-Stokes equations which couple momentum and mass conservation to completely describe fluid motion. Our starting point is an environment containing an arbitrary distribution of fluid, and submerged or semi-submerged obstacles. Velocity and pressure are defined everywhere within this environment, and updated using a set of finite difference expressions. The resulting vector and scalar fields are used to drive a height field equation representing the liquid surface. The nature of the coupling between obstacles in the environment and free variables allows for the simulation of a wide range of effects that were not possible with previous computer-graphics fluid models. Wave effects such as reflection, refraction and diffraction, as well as rotati...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1996
• Where: GRAPHICSINTERFACE
• Authors: Nick Foster, Dimitris N. Metaxas
• Keywords: Finite Difference, Fluid, GRAPHICSINTERFACE 1996, GRAPHICSINTERFACE 2007, Navier-Stokes Equations