INTERACTIVE WATER STREAMS

ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive Graphics and Games (i3D), 2009. Boston, Massachusetts.

2009. Hoetzlein, R. and Hollerer, Tobias. “Interactive Water Streams with Sphere Scan Conversion”. ACM Interactive Graphics and Games (i3D) 2009. Boston, Massachusetts. February 2009.

The potential of real time fluid simulation presents a range of novel opportunities in interactive game design, film production, media arts, and live performance. While GPU simulation of fluids as particles is now possible at interactive rates (see Fluids v.3), rendering of a water surface requires additional computational resources. Polygonization, the transforming of particle simulations into a set of renderable polygons (triangles), has typically been performed using the Marching Cubes algorithm.

Scan conversion is a novel technique for polygonization which generates a surface by conforming a cylinder around the fluid. While limited to stream-like fluids, sphere scan conversion performs significantly faster than traditional marching cubes, enabling direct interaction with the rendered fluid.