Procedural and interactive icicle modeling

Icicle formation is a complex phenomenon which makes it difficult to model for computer graphics applications. The methods commonly used in computer graphics to model icicles provide only minimal control over the results and require several minutes or even hours of computation. This paper proposes a procedural approach allowing interactive modeling, which is broken down into four stages. The first computes the water motion on the surface; the second determines where the water drips; the third computes the trajectories of the icicles growth, and the fourth creates the surface. In addition, the approach allows the creation of glaze ice. The results are not only realistic but also rapidly computed. This approach provides a significant increase in control over results and computation speed.