Physics-Based Animation

Tobias Martin, Nobuyuki Umetani, Bernd Bickel

This paper introduces “OmniAD,” a novel data-driven pipeline to model and acquire the aerodynamics of three-dimensional rigid objects. Traditionally, aerodynamics are examined through elaborate wind tunnel experiments or expensive fluid dynamics computations, and are only measured for a small number of discrete wind directions. OmniAD allows the evaluation of aerodynamic forces, such as drag and lift, for any incoming wind direction using a novel representation based on spherical harmonics. Our datadriven technique acquires the aerodynamic properties of an object simply by capturing its falling motion using a single camera. Once model parameters are estimated, OmniAD enables realistic realtime simulation of rigid bodies, such as the tumbling and gliding of leaves, without simulating the surrounding air. In addition, we propose an intuitive user interface based on OmniAD to interactively design three-dimensional kites that actually fly. Various nontraditional kites were designed to demonstrate the physical validity of our model.

OmniAD- Data-driven Omni-directional Aerodynamics

Jan Bender, Dan Koschier

In this paper we introduce an efficient and stable implicit SPH method for the physically-based simulation of incompressible fluids. In the area of computer graphics the most efficient SPH approaches focus solely on the correction of the density error to prevent volume compression. However, the continuity equation for incompressible flow also demands a divergence-free velocity field which is neglected by most methods. Although a few methods consider velocity divergence, they are either slow or have a perceivable density fluctuation. Our novel method uses an efficient combination of two pressure solvers which enforce low volume compression (below 0.01%) and a divergence-free velocity field. This can be seen as enforcing incompressibility both on position level and velocity level. The first part is essential for realistic physical behavior while the divergence-free state increases the stability significantly and reduces the number of solver iterations. Moreover, it allows larger time steps which yields a considerable performance gain since particle neighborhoods have to be updated less frequently. Therefore, our divergence-free SPH (DFSPH) approach is significantly faster and more stable than current state-of-the-art SPH methods for incompressible fluids. We demonstrate this in simulations with millions of fast moving particles.

Divergence-Free Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics

Omri Azencot, Orestis Vantzos, Max Wardetzky, Martin Rumpf, Mirela Ben-Chen

The motion of a thin viscous film of fluid on a curved surface exhibits many intricate visual phenomena, which are challenging to simulate using existing techniques. A possible alternative is to use a reduced model, involving only the temporal evolution of the mass density of the film on the surface. However, in this model, the motion is governed by a fourth-order nonlinear PDE, which involves geometric quantities such as the curvature of the underlying surface, and is therefore difficult to discretize. Inspired by a recent variational formulation for this problem on smooth surfaces, we present a corresponding model for triangle meshes. We provide a discretization for the curvature and advection operators which leads to an efficient and stable numerical scheme, requires a single sparse linear solve per time step, and exactly preserves the total volume of the fluid. We validate our method by qualitatively comparing to known results from the literature, and demonstrate various intricate effects achievable by our method, such as droplet formation, evaporation, droplets interaction and viscous fingering.

Functional Thin Films on Surfaces

Andreas Peer, Markus Ihmsen, Jens Cornelis, Matthias Teschner

We present a novel implicit formulation for highly viscous fluids simulated with Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics SPH. Compared to explicit methods, our formulation is significantly more efficient and handles a larger range of viscosities. Differing from existing implicit formulations, our approach reconstructs the velocity field from a target velocity gradient. This gradient encodes a desired shear-rate damping and preserves the velocity divergence that is introduced by the SPH pressure solver to counteract density deviations. The target gradient ensures that pressure and viscosity computation do not interfere. Therefore, only one pressure projection step is required, which is in contrast to state-of-the-art implicit Eulerian formulations. While our model differs from true viscosity in that vorticity diffusion is not encoded in the target gradient, it nevertheless captures many of the qualitative behaviors of viscous liquids. Our formulation can easily be incorporated into complex scenarios with one- and two-way coupled solids and multiple fluid phases with different densities and viscosities.

An Implicit Viscosity Formulation for SPH Fluids