Animating bubble interactions in a liquid foam

Abstract

Bubbles and foams are important features of liquid surface phenomena, but they are difficult to animate due to their thin films and complex interactions in the real world. In particular, small bubbles (having diameter <1cm) in a dense foam are highly affected by surface tension, so their shapes are much less deformable compared with larger bubbles. Under this small bubble assumption, we propose a more accurate and efficient particle-based algorithm to simulate bubble dynamics and interactions. The key component of this algorithm is an approximation of foam geometry, by treating bubble particles as the sites of a weighted Voronoi diagram. The connectivity information provided by the Voronoi diagram allows us to accurately model various interaction effects among bubbles. Using Voronoi cells and weights, we can also explicitly address the volume loss issue in foam simulation, which is a common problem in previous approaches. Under this framework, we present a set of bubble interaction forces to handle miscellaneous foam behaviors, including foam structure under Plateau's laws, clusters formed by liquid surface bubbles, bubble-liquid and bubble-solid coupling, bursting and coalescing. Our experiment shows that this method can be straightforwardly incorporated into existing liquid simulators, and it can efficiently generate realistic foam animations, some of which have never been produced in graphics before.