A Flexible Image Processing Approach to the Surfacing of Particle-Based Fluid Animation (Invited Talk)

In recent years particle based techniques, like FLIP, have all but replaced Eulerian techniques for free-surface fluid animation in movie production. This, in turn, has put more emphasis on efficient tools that can turn point clouds into water surfaces. In this context one of the main challenges is to devise an approach that allows for both a high degree of artistic control as well as fast turnaround. In this chapter we outline such a system that has found good use at DreamWorks Animation. The core idea is surprisingly simple and yet powerful: create flexible and complex surface processing by means of daisy chaining simple and fast surface operators.