Blobtacular: Surfacing particle Systems

Figure 1: Left: Blobtacular is used to generate water dripping off a pirate ship. Right: A large teapot is sprayed with blended micro-teapots. We have developed a tool for efficient and flexible surfacing of par-ticle systems using various optimized level set techniques and data structures. Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) is a popular technique in production environments since it allows for relatively fast simulations of fluid effects like splashes, filaments, and thin-sheets. These elements are computationally intensive to produce with grid based fluid solvers. The traditional approach to surfacing particle systems uses CSG blending of spherical metaballs sampled on a dense, regular 3D grid. This severely limits the quality of the resulting surfaces due to resolution and computational overheads in both time and memory. Consequently SPH surfaces often have a characteristic “blobby look ” that clearly reveals the underlying particles. Furthermore, particle systems are typically sparse and occupy large (empty) spaces, making them very inefficient to sam