Toon Lenaerts Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

Contact: Toon Lenaerts

Ph.D. Thesis, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 97 + xvi p
ISBN/ISSN: 978-94-6018-162-7

Abstract

Today's computer animations and movies with special effects have reached a high level of realism and complexity. Modeling and animation software has become more and more versatile and offers state-of-the-art physics-based algorithms for solving the dynamics of real-life phenomena.

This dissertation covers such algorithms for the simulation of fluid behavior and the dynamics of objects. We specifically concentrate on their mutual interactions. Generally previous systems only simulate the geometry of objects in combination with fluids, therefore treating the object as an impenetrable solid. Yet most objects are made out of porous materials such as sponges or cloth.

In this work we present a novel simulation algorithm for porous flow through a wide variety of fluid-absorbent objects and granular volumes. We introduce the physical principles governing porous flow into a Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) framework. We show how secondary effects of the absorbed fluid on the porous material can be incorporated in our unified particle-based SPH framework for simulating fluids, rigid bodies, elastic bodies, cloth and granular materials.

The result is a physics-based animation package capable of producing animations of new unseen effects including mass and buoyancy changes, weakening of elastic materials, sticky wet cloth, moist sand sculptures and mud formation.

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Keywords: particles, sph, porous flow, fluid, cloth, sand

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Animations

The figures in this dissertation contain frames from animations showing the effects of our algorithms. Though these frames were selected to be representative we would like to point the reader to the full animations. These animations are available on the DVD enclosed in the book or can be viewed online here