Real-time high-quality surface rendering for large scale particle-based fluids

Abstract

Particle-based methods like Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) are increasingly adopted for large scale fluid simulation in interactive computer graphics. However, surface rendering for such dynamic particle sets is challenging: current methods either produce coarse results, or time consuming. We introduce a novel approach to render high-quality fluid surface in screen space by an efficient combination of particle splatting, ray-casting and surface normal estimation techniques. We apply particle splatting to accelerate ray-casting process, and estimate surface normal using Principal Component Analysis (PCA). We adopt GPU technique to further accelerate our method. Our method can produce high-quality smooth surface while preserving thin and sharp details of large scale fluids. The computation and memory cost of our rendering step only depend on the image resolution. These advantages make our method very suitable for previewing or rendering hundreds of millions particles interactively. We demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our method by rendering various fluid scenarios with different-sized particle sets.