TY - JOUR AB - This paper generalizes the well-known Diffusion Curves Images (DCI), which are composed of a set of Bezier curves with colors specified on either side. These colors are diffused as Laplace functions over the image domain, which results in smooth color gradients interrupted by the Bezier curves. Our new formulation allows for more color control away from the boundary, providing a similar expressive power as recent Bilaplace image models without introducing associated issues and computational costs. The new model is based on a special Laplace function blending and a new edge blur formulation. We demonstrate that given some user-defined boundary curves over an input raster image, fitting colors and edge blur from the image to the new model and subsequent editing and animation is equally convenient as with DCIs. Numerous examples and comparisons to DCIs are presented. AU - Jeschke, Stefan ID - 1413 IS - 2 JF - Computer Graphics Forum TI - Generalized diffusion curves: An improved vector representation for smooth-shaded images VL - 35 ER - TY - JOUR AB - The Fluid Implicit Particle method (FLIP) for liquid simulations uses particles to reduce numerical dissipation and provide important visual cues for events like complex splashes and small-scale features near the liquid surface. Unfortunately, FLIP simulations can be computationally expensive, because they require a dense sampling of particles to fill the entire liquid volume. Furthermore, the vast majority of these FLIP particles contribute nothing to the fluid's visual appearance, especially for larger volumes of liquid. We present a method that only uses FLIP particles within a narrow band of the liquid surface, while efficiently representing the remaining inner volume on a regular grid. We show that a naïve realization of this idea introduces unstable and uncontrollable energy fluctuations, and we propose a novel coupling scheme between FLIP particles and regular grid which overcomes this problem. Our method drastically reduces the particle count and simulation times while yielding results that are nearly indistinguishable from regular FLIP simulations. Our approach is easy to integrate into any existing FLIP implementation. AU - Ferstl, Florian AU - Ando, Ryoichi AU - Wojtan, Christopher J AU - Westermann, Rüdiger AU - Thuerey, Nils ID - 1415 IS - 2 JF - Computer Graphics Forum TI - Narrow band FLIP for liquid simulations VL - 35 ER - TY - CONF AB - We present a boundary element based method for fast simulation of brittle fracture. By introducing simplifying assumptions that allow us to quickly estimate stress intensities and opening displacements during crack propagation, we build a fracture algorithm where the cost of each time step scales linearly with the length of the crackfront. The transition from a full boundary element method to our faster variant is possible at the beginning of any time step. This allows us to build a hybrid method, which uses the expensive but more accurate BEM while the number of degrees of freedom is low, and uses the fast method once that number exceeds a given threshold as the crack geometry becomes more complicated. Furthermore, we integrate this fracture simulation with a standard rigid-body solver. Our rigid-body coupling solves a Neumann boundary value problem by carefully separating translational, rotational and deformational components of the collision forces and then applying a Tikhonov regularizer to the resulting linear system. We show that our method produces physically reasonable results in standard test cases and is capable of dealing with complex scenes faster than previous finite- or boundary element approaches. AU - Hahn, David AU - Wojtan, Christopher J ID - 1362 IS - 4 TI - Fast approximations for boundary element based brittle fracture simulation VL - 35 ER - TY - THES AB - Computer graphics is an extremely exciting field for two reasons. On the one hand, there is a healthy injection of pragmatism coming from the visual effects industry that want robust algorithms that work so they can produce results at an increasingly frantic pace. On the other hand, they must always try to push the envelope and achieve the impossible to wow their audiences in the next blockbuster, which means that the industry has not succumb to conservatism, and there is plenty of room to try out new and crazy ideas if there is a chance that it will pan into something useful. Water simulation has been in visual effects for decades, however it still remains extremely challenging because of its high computational cost and difficult artdirectability. The work in this thesis tries to address some of these difficulties. Specifically, we make the following three novel contributions to the state-of-the-art in water simulation for visual effects. First, we develop the first algorithm that can convert any sequence of closed surfaces in time into a moving triangle mesh. State-of-the-art methods at the time could only handle surfaces with fixed connectivity, but we are the first to be able to handle surfaces that merge and split apart. This is important for water simulation practitioners, because it allows them to convert splashy water surfaces extracted from particles or simulated using grid-based level sets into triangle meshes that can be either textured and enhanced with extra surface dynamics as a post-process. We also apply our algorithm to other phenomena that merge and split apart, such as morphs and noisy reconstructions of human performances. Second, we formulate a surface-based energy that measures the deviation of a water surface froma physically valid state. Such discrepancies arise when there is a mismatch in the degrees of freedom between the water surface and the underlying physics solver. This commonly happens when practitioners use a moving triangle mesh with a grid-based physics solver, or when high-resolution grid-based surfaces are combined with low-resolution physics. Following the direction of steepest descent on our surface-based energy, we can either smooth these artifacts or turn them into high-resolution waves by interpreting the energy as a physical potential. Third, we extend state-of-the-art techniques in non-reflecting boundaries to handle spatially and time-varying background flows. This allows a novel new workflow where practitioners can re-simulate part of an existing simulation, such as removing a solid obstacle, adding a new splash or locally changing the resolution. Such changes can easily lead to new waves in the re-simulated region that would reflect off of the new simulation boundary, effectively ruining the illusion of a seamless simulation boundary between the existing and new simulations. Our non-reflecting boundaries makes sure that such waves are absorbed. AU - Bojsen-Hansen, Morten ID - 1122 SN - 2663-337X TI - Tracking, correcting and absorbing water surface waves ER - TY - CONF AB - Simulating the delightful dynamics of soap films, bubbles, and foams has traditionally required the use of a fully three-dimensional many-phase Navier-Stokes solver, even though their visual appearance is completely dominated by the thin liquid surface. We depart from earlier work on soap bubbles and foams by noting that their dynamics are naturally described by a Lagrangian vortex sheet model in which circulation is the primary variable. This leads us to derive a novel circulation-preserving surface-only discretization of foam dynamics driven by surface tension on a non-manifold triangle mesh. We represent the surface using a mesh-based multimaterial surface tracker which supports complex bubble topology changes, and evolve the surface according to the ambient air flow induced by a scalar circulation field stored on the mesh. Surface tension forces give rise to a simple update rule for circulation, even at non-manifold Plateau borders, based on a discrete measure of signed scalar mean curvature. We further incorporate vertex constraints to enable the interaction of soap films with wires. The result is a method that is at once simple, robust, and efficient, yet able to capture an array of soap films behaviors including foam rearrangement, catenoid collapse, blowing bubbles, and double bubbles being pulled apart. AU - Da, Fang AU - Batty, Christopher AU - Wojtan, Christopher J AU - Grinspun, Eitan ID - 1634 IS - 4 TI - Double bubbles sans toil and trouble: discrete circulation-preserving vortex sheets for soap films and foams VL - 34 ER -