A semi-Lagrangian contouring method for fluid simulation

Adam W. Bargteil, Tolga G. Goktekin, James F. O'brien, John A. Strain
2006 ACM Transactions on Graphics  
In this article, we present a semi-Lagrangian surface tracking method for use with fluid simulations. Our method maintains an explicit polygonal mesh that defines the surface, and an octree data structure that provides both a spatial index for the mesh and a means for efficiently approximating the signed distance to the surface. At each timestep, a new surface is constructed by extracting the zero set of an advected signed-distance function. Semi-Lagrangian backward path tracing is used to
more » ... t the signed-distance function. One of the primary advantages of this formulation is that it enables tracking of surface characteristics, such as color or texture coordinates, at negligible additional cost. We include several examples demonstrating that the method can be effectively used as part of a fluid simulation to animate complex and interesting fluid behaviors.
doi:10.1145/1122501.1122503 fatcat:6bge3p2do5bo5ora4oj6hldsba