A Deformable Surface Model for Real-Time Water Drop Animation

—A water drop behaves differently from a large water body because of its strong viscosity and surface tension under the small scale. Surface tension causes the motion of a water drop to be largely determined by its boundary surface. Meanwhile, viscosity makes the interior of a water drop less relevant to its motion, as the smooth velocity field can be well approximated by an interpolation of the velocity on the boundary. Consequently, we propose a fast deformable surface model to realistically animate water drops and their flowing behaviors on solid surfaces. Our system efficiently simulates water drop motions in a Lagrangian fashion, by reducing 3D fluid dynamics over the whole liquid volume to a deformable surface model. In each time step, the model uses an implicit mean curvature flow operator to produce surface tension effects, a contact angle operator to change droplet shapes on solid surfaces, and a set of mesh connectivity updates to handle topological changes and improve...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: TVCG
• Authors: Yizhong Zhang, Huamin Wang, Shuai Wang, Yiying Tong, Kun Zhou
• Keywords: Capillary Waves, Hardware, Simulation Approaches, Surface Tension Effects, TVCG 2012