Animation of open water phenomena with coupled shallow water and free surface simulations

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to perform simulations that capture fluid effects from small drops up to the propagation of large waves. To achieve this, we present a hybrid simulation method, that couples a two-dimensional shallow water simulation with a full three-dimensional free surface fluid simulation. We explain the approximations imposed by the shallow water model, and how to parametrize it according to the parameters of a 3D simulation. Each simulation is used to initialize double layered boundary conditions for the other one. The area covered by the 2D region can be an order of magnitude larger than the 3D region without significantly effecting the overall computation time. The 3D region can furthermore be easily moved within the 2D region during the course of the simulation. To achieve realistic results we combine our simulation method with a physically based model to generate and animate drops. For their generation we make use of the fluid turbulence model, and animate them with a simplified drag calculation. This allows simulations with relatively low resolutions.