Interactive Rendering of Giga-Particle Fluid Simulations

Florian Reichl, Matthäus G. Chajdas, Jens Schneider, and Rüdiger Westermann

Department of Computer Science, Technische Universität München, Germany

Abstract

We describe the design of an interactive rendering system for particle-based fluid simulations comprising hundreds of millions of particles per time step. We present a novel binary voxel representation for particle positions in combination with random jitter to drastically reduce memory and bandwidth requirements. To avoid a time-consuming preprocess and restrict the workload to what is seen, the construction of this representation is embedded into front-to-back GPU ray-casting. For high speed rendering, we ray-cast spheres and extend on total-variation-based image de-noising models to smooth the fluid surface according to data specific boundary conditions. The regular voxel structure permits highly efficient ray-sphere intersection testing as well as classification of foam particles at runtime on the GPU. Foam particles are rendered volumetrically by reconstructing densities from the binary representation on-the-fly. The particular design of our system allows scrubbing through high-resolution animated fluids at interactive rates.

Downloads

A (binary) demo of the proposed system is available for download here. We're planning on also supplying some demo datasets in the near future.

Results

All results have been generated on a single NVidia GeForce GTX Titan and rendered at interactive rates of ~20 frames per second.

Associated Publications

Interactive Rendering of Giga-Particle Fluid Simulations
Florian Reichl, Matthäus G. Chajdas, Jens Schneider, and Rüdiger Westermann
Proceedings of High Performance Graphics 2014 [PDF] [Bibtex] [Demo (Binary)]