Report CW 559, 13 pages, Departement Computerwetenschappen, KU Leuven, Celestijnenlaan 200A, 3001 Heverlee, Belgium, 2009.
In recent years, several techniques have been proposed to simulate the physical behavior of fluids and objects. A noticeable trend in particle-based simulation frameworks is to unify the simulation of different kinds of materials, in order to simplify interactions and phase changes. Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH), is often used to solve the necessary equations. While the resulting systems can simulate interactions between different kinds of materials and simulate some phase changes, they lack the freedom to model and simulate more complex animations. In this paper, we propose an architecture for such a unified framework, providing not only the means to integrate multiple material simulations, but also ways to continuously fade between materials and freely combine materials. This allows the animator, within a single framework, to model complex animations based on physical building blocks, ranging from physically plausible phase changes such as melting wax to the fictional dynamics of paint-based clothing.
