Physics-Based Animation

Aviv Segall, Orestis Vantzos, Mirela Ben-Chen

Hele-Shaw flow describes the slow flow of a viscous liquid between two parallel plates separated by a small gap. In some configurations such a flow generates instabilities known as Saffman-Taylor fingers, which form intricate visual patterns. While these patterns have been an inspiration for artists, as well as thoroughly analyzed by mathematicians, efficiently simulating them remains challenging. The main difficulty involves efficiently computing a harmonic function on a time-varying planar domain, a problem which has been recently addressed in the shape deformation literature using a complex-variable formulation of generalized barycentric coordinates. We propose to leverage similar machinery, and show how the model equations for the Hele-Shaw flow can be formulated in this framework. This allows us to efficiently simulate the flow, while allowing interactive user control of the behavior of the fingers. We additionally show that complex barycentric coordinates are applicable to the exterior domain, and use them to simulate two-phase flow, yielding a variety of interesting patterns.

Hele-Shaw Flow Simulation with Interactive Control using Complex Barycentric Coordinates

Vinicius C. Azevedo, Christopher Batty, Manuel M. Oliveira

Fluid animation methods based on Eulerian grids have long struggled to resolve flows involving narrow gaps and thin solid features. Past approaches have artificially inflated or voxelized boundaries, although this sacrifices the correct geometry and topology of the fluid domain and prevents flow through narrow regions. We present a boundary-respecting fluid simulator that overcomes these challenges. Our solution is to intersect the solid boundary geometry with the cells of a background regular grid to generate a topologically correct, boundary-conforming cut-cell mesh. We extend both pressure projection and velocity advection to support this enhanced grid structure. For pressure projection, we introduce a general graph-based scheme that properly preserves discrete incompressibility even in thin and topologically complex flow regions, while nevertheless yielding symmetric positive definite linear systems. For advection, we exploit polyhedral interpolation to improve the degree to which the flow conforms to irregular and possibly non-convex cell boundaries, and propose a modified PIC/FLIP advection scheme to eliminate the need to inaccurately reinitialize invalid cells that are swept over by moving boundaries. The method naturally extends the standard Eulerian fluid simulation framework, and while we focus on thin boundaries, our contributions are beneficial for volumetric solids as well. Our results demonstrate successful one-way fluid-solid coupling in the presence of thin objects and narrow flow regions even on very coarse grids.

Preserving Geometry and Topology for Fluid Flows with Thin Obstacles and Narrow Gaps

Albert Chern, Felix Knoppel, Ulrich Pinkall, Peter Schröder, Steffen Weissmann

We describe a new approach for the purely Eulerian simulation of incompressible fluids. In it, the fluid state is represented by a ℂ²-valued wave function evolving under the Schrödinger equation subject to incompressibility constraints. The underlying dynamical system is Hamiltonian and governed by the kinetic energy of the fluid together with an energy of Landau-Lifshitz type. The latter ensures that dynamics due to thin vortical structures, all important for visual simulation, are faithfully reproduced. This enables robust simulation of intricate phenomena such as vortical wakes and interacting vortex filaments, even on modestly sized grids. Our implementation uses a simple splitting method for time integration, employing the FFT for Schrödinger evolution as well as constraint projection. Using a standard penalty method we also allow arbitrary obstacles. The resulting algorithm is simple, unconditionally stable, and efficient. In particular it does not require any Lagrangian techniques for advection or to counteract the loss of vorticity. We demonstrate its use in a variety of scenarios, compare it with experiments, and evaluate it against benchmark tests. A full implementation is included in the ancillary materials.

Schrödinger’s Smoke

Morten Bojsen-Hansen, Chris Wojtan

When aiming to seamlessly integrate a fluid simulation into a larger scenario (like an open ocean), careful attention must be paid to boundary conditions. In particular, one must implement special “non-reflecting” boundary conditions, which dissipate out-going waves as they exit the simulation. Unfortunately, the state of the art in non-reflecting boundary conditions (perfectly-matched layers, or PMLs) only permits trivially simple inflow/outflow conditions, so there is no reliable way to integrate a fluid simulation into a more complicated environment like a stormy ocean or a turbulent river. This paper introduces the first method for combining non-reflecting boundary conditions based on PMLs with inflow/outflow boundary conditions that vary arbitrarily throughout space and time. Our algorithm is a generalization of state-of-the-art mean-flow boundary conditions in the computational fluid dynamics literature, and it allows for seamless integration of a fluid simulation into much more complicated environments. Our method also opens the door for previously-unseen post-process effects like retroactively changing the location of solid obstacles, and locally increasing the visual detail of a pre-existing simulation.

Generalized Non-Reflecting Boundaries for Fluid Re-Simulation