“Guide shapes for high resolution naturalistic liquid simulation” by Nielsen and Bridson

Art direction of high resolution naturalistic liquid simulations is notoriously hard, due to both the chaotic nature of the physics and the computational resources required. Resimulating a scene at higher resolution often produces very different results, and is too expensive to allow many design cycles. We present a method of constraining or guiding a high resolution liquid simulation to stay close to a finalized low resolution version (either simulated or directly animated), restricting the solve to a thin outer shell of liquid around a guide shape. Our method is generally faster than an unconstrained simulation and can be integrated with a standard fluid simulator. We demonstrate several applications, with both simulated and hand-animated inputs.

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