Simple, Rasterization-based Liquids

International audienceRasterization pipelines are ubiquitous today. They can be found in most of our personal computers as well as in smaller, hand-held devices--like smart phones--with lower-end hardware. However, simulating particle-based liquids requires sorting the particles which is cumbersome when using a rasterization pipeline. In this chapter, we describe a method to simulate liquids without having to sort the particles. Our method was specifically designed for these architectures and low shader model specifications (starting from shader model 3 for 3D liquids). Instead of sorting the particles, we splat them onto a grid (i.e. a 3D or 2D texture) and solve the inter-particle dynamics directly on the grid. Splatting is simple to perform in a rasterization pipeline, but can also be costly. Thanks to the simplified pass on the grid, we only need to splat the particles once. The grid also provides additional benefits: we can easily add artificial obstacles for the particles to interact with, we can ray cast the grid directly to render the liquid surface, and we can even gain a speed up over sort-based liquid solvers--such as the optimized solver found in the DirectX 11 SDK