A particle-based method for preserving fluid sheets

Abstract

We present a new particle-based method that explicitly preserves thin fluid sheets for animating liquids. Our primary contribution is a meshless particle-based framework that splits at thin points and collapses at dense points to prevent the breakup of liquid. In contrast to existing surface tracking methods, the proposed framework does not suffer from numerical diffusion or tangles, and robustly handles topology changes by the meshless representation. As the underlying fluid model, we use Fluid-Implicit-Particle (FLIP) with weak spring forces to generate smooth particle-based liquid animation that maintains an even spatial particle distribution in the presence of eddying or inertial motions. The thin features are detected by examining stretches of distributions of neighboring particles by performing Principle Component Analysis (PCA), which is used to reconstruct thin surfaces with anisotropic kernels. Our algorithm is intuitively implemented, easy to parallelize and capable of producing visually complex thin liquid animations.