ERC Starting Grant - realFlow

In 2015, Nils Thuerey was awarded a Starting Grant by the European Research Council (ERC). The grant with a total volume of almost 1.5 million euro is aimed at novel simulation and reconstruction algorithms for fluid flows.

The research project is titled “realFlow - Virtualization of Real Flows for Animation and Simulation" (StG-2015-637014). It's goal is to improve the simulation of physical processes and, above all, make it possible to generate such simulations more quickly. The focus here is on liquids and gases, so-called fluids. 
 
Simulations of fluids can be very useful in many applications – for example in the design of aircraft wings and the depiction of explosions in films and computer games. Blood flow simulations in medicine can help in the assessment of the threat posed by aneurysms. We plan to create a database containing previously-calculated simulations and video recordings of the behavior of real fluids. This information would then be available for new simulations. The project involves, firstly, the development of machine learning algorithms that will enable the processing, comparison and classification of enormous volumes of data. Video recordings of the actual liquids or gases must also be analyzed and transformed into compatible data. Ideally, this will lead to interactive and stable simulations of complex physics effects.

Publications

A full list with PDFs/videos can be found here.

* Dispersion Kernels for Water Wave Simulation   
Jose-Angel Canabal Delgado, David Miraut, Nils Thuerey, Theodore Kim, Javier Portilla, Miguel Otaduy 
Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH Asia) 35(4); ACM, 2016

* SMASH: Physics-guided Reconstruction of Collisions from Videos  
Aron Monszpart, Nils Thuerey, Niloy Mitra 
Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH Asia) 35(4); ACM, 2016

* Interpolations of Smoke and Liquid Simulations   
Nils Thuerey 
Transactions on Graphics 36(1); ACM, 2016

* Example-based Plastic Deformation of Rigid Bodies  
Ben Jones, Nils Thuerey, Tamar Shinar, Adam Bargteil 
Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH); ACM, 2016

* Narrow Band FLIP for Liquid Simulations  
Florian Ferstl, Ryoichi Ando, Chris Wojtan, Ruediger Westermann, Nils Thuerey 
Eurographics'16; Eurographics Association, 2016

* A Stream Function Solver for Liquid Simulations 
Ryoichi Ando, Nils Thuerey, and Chris Wojtan 
Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH); ACM, 2015