2D Surface Tension Liquids
Liquid simulation has been an interest of mine for some time now. Water, maybe the most ubiquitous liquid familiar to us, exhibits many fascinating visual properties. This makes water simulation a very hot topic in the visual effects industry.
In the history of liquid simulation, there hasn’t been one single efficient, clear cut method for simulating water in all its capacity. Each method has its advantages and disadvantages. In the visual effects industry, prominent methods for liquid simulation are grid-based (e.g. Houdini, Blender). These methods tend to have poor support for stable surface forces, because they typically lack an explicit surface representation.
To remedy this issue, I developed a method for liquid simulation that couples with existing grid-based methods and can exhibit stable surface tension effects, under the supervision of Christopher Batty. This project took just over a year to complete and resulted in my Master’s thesis titled “The Mimetic Approach to Incompressible Surface Tension Flows”:
It can also be found on the university repository.
The following supplemental video outlines various results I was able to achieve in 2D:
The Mimetic Approach to Incompressible Surface Tension Flows from Egor Larionov on Vimeo.
A number of jupyter notebooks with Julia code used for numerical studies related to MFD can be found on github.