[Abstract]

This paper presents a new efficient method for animating sand and other granular materials in 3D scenes. Our method couples 2D and 3D simulation techniques in a physically based way. A surface flow model of granular material-the BCRE model-is used to separate sand piles into two layers: a surface flowing layer and a static layer. The surface layer is simulated using discrete element method (DEM) to capture the detailed flowing behavior, while the invisible and static layer is represented by a height field for efficiency. The matter transfer between the two layers is modeled based on the surface flow equations through a particle interface. We demonstrate that our method leads to significant improvements of computational efficiency compared to standard discrete element method, without sacrificing the rich 3D animation effects.

Bo Zhu, Xubo Yang. Animating Sand as a Surface Flow. Proc. of Eurographics 2010 (Short Paper), Norrkoping, Sweden, May 3-7, 2010.

Paper: [pdf], Video: [avi, 19.6M(low)] [avi, 37.8M(high)], Presentation: [slides]