Target-driven liquid animation with interfacial discontinuities

Abstract

We propose a novel method of controlling a multi-phase fluid so that it flows into a target shape in a natural way. To preserve the sharp detail of the target shape, we represent it as an implicit function and construct the level-set of that function. Previous approaches add the target-driven control force as an external term, which then becomes attenuated during the velocity projection step, making the convergence process unstable and causing sharp detail to be lost from the target shape. But we calculate the force on the fluid from the pressure discontinuity at the interface between phases, and integrate the control force into the projection step so as to preserve its effect. The control force is calculated using an enhanced version of the ghost fluid method (GFM), which guarantees that the fluid flows from the source shape and converges into the target shape, while achieving a more natural animation than other approaches. Our control force is merged during the projection step avoiding the need for a post-optimization process to eliminate divergence at the liquid interface. This makes our method easy to implement using existing fluid engines and it incurs little computational overhead. Experimental results show the accuracy and robustness of this technique. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.