Boundary Detection in Particle-based Fluids

• Published in: Computer graphics forum Vol. 35; no. 2; pp. 215 - 224
• Main Authors: Sandim, Marcos, Cedrim, Douglas, Nonato, Luis Gustavo, Pagliosa, Paulo, Paiva, Afonso
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.05.2016
• Subjects: Analysis; and object representations; Boundaries; Categories and Subject Descriptors (according to ACM CCS); Computational fluid dynamics; Computer graphics; Computer simulation; Fluid flow; Fluid mechanics; Fluids; I.3.5 [Computer Graphics]: Computational Geometry and Object Modeling-Boundary representations; I.3.5 [Computer Graphics]: Computational Geometry and Object Modeling-Curve; I.3.5 [Computer Graphics]: Computational Geometry and Object Modeling-Physically based modeling; I.3.5 [Computer Graphics]: Computational Geometry and Object Modeling—Curve, surface, solid, and object representations; I.3.7 [Computer Graphics]: Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism-Animation; Rendering; Representations; Simulation; solid; State of the art; Studies; surface
• ISSN: 0167-7055; 1467-8659
• DOI: 10.1111/cgf.12824

This paper presents a novel method to detect free‐surfaces on particle‐based volume representation. In contrast to most particle‐based free‐surface detection methods, which perform the surface identification based on physical and geometrical properties derived from the underlying fluid flow simulation, the proposed approach only demands the spatial location of the particles to properly recognize surface particles, avoiding even the use of kernels. Boundary particles are identified through a Hidden Point Removal (HPR) operator used for visibility test. Our method is very simple, fast, easy to implement and robust to changes in the distribution of particles, even when facing large deformation of the free‐surface. A set of comparisons against state‐of‐the‐art boundary detection methods show the effectiveness of our approach. The good performance of our method is also attested in the context of fluid flow simulation involving free‐surface, mainly when using level‐sets for rendering purposes.