“Fine Tuning Every Grain on the Beach” by Angelidis, Tang, Bruins, Yi, Quirus, et al. …
Conference:
Type(s):
Title:
- Fine Tuning Every Grain on the Beach
Session/Category Title:
- Emotions, Explosions, and Epic Simulations
Presenter(s)/Author(s):
Moderator(s):
Abstract:
For the interactive beaches featured on Pixar’s Elio, we developed an innovative method which improved upon past approaches. Traditional interactive sand pipelines are made of three parts: a render-optimized surface with limited grain interaction for most of the set, a limited number of interactive particles, and a compositing integration step to bridge a notorious gap between static set sand and interactive sand. Our approach introduces a render-optimized sand asset entirely made of points with reading and writing capability for every point, ready to modify for interaction without look alteration. This drastic workflow simplification provided a much more capable pipeline leading to the efficient authoring of individually tweakable sand grains above half a billion. By leveraging a perceptual model that uses the camera frustums of all frames, we plausibly represented expansive areas which in reality would be composed of many trillions of grains.
References:
[1] Theodore Kim, Nils Thürey, Doug James, and Markus Gross. 2008. Wavelet Turbulence for Fluid Simulation. ACM Trans. Graph. 27, 3, Article 50 (Aug 2008), 50:1–50:6 pages.
