Physics-based fluid simulation in Computer Graphics: Survey, research trends, and challenges

Physics-based fluid simulation has played an increasingly important role in the computer graphics community. Recent methods in this area have greatly improved in generating complex visual effects and also in computational efficiency. Novel techniques have emerged to deal with complex boundaries, multiphase fluids, gas-liquid interfaces, and fine details. In parallel, the combined use of machine learning, image processing, and fluid control technologies has brought many interesting and novel research perspectives. In this survey, we provide an introduction to theoretical concepts underpinning physics-based fluid simulation and their practical implementation with the aim to serve as a guide for both newcomer and seasoned researchers for exploring the physics-based fluid simulation field, with a focus on recent developments in the last decade. Driven by the distribution of recent publications in the field, we structure our survey to cover physical background, discretization approaches, computational methods that address scalability, fluid interactions with other materials and interfaces, and methods for expressive aspects of surface detail and control. From a practical perspective, we overview existing implementations available for the above methods.