An advection-reflection solver for detail-preserving fluid simulation

Advection-projection methods for fluid animation are widely appreciated for their stability and efficiency. However, the projection step dissipates energy from the system, leading to artificial viscosity and suppression of small-scale details. We propose an alternative approach for detail-preserving fluid animation that is surprisingly simple and effective. We replace the energy-dissipating projection operator applied at the end of a simulation step by an energy-preserving reflection operator applied at mid-step. We show that doing so leads to two orders of magnitude reduction in energy loss, which in turn yields vastly improved detail-preservation. We evaluate our reflection solver on a set of 2D and 3D numerical experiments and show that it compares favorably to state-of-the-art methods. Finally, our method integrates seamlessly with existing projection-advection solvers and requires very little additional implementation.