CW 453

Bart Adams, Toon Lenaerts, Philip Dutré
Particle splatting: Interactive rendering of particle-based simulation data

Abstract

Particle-based simulation methods are gaining popularity for creating animations of physical phenomena such as fluids and melting solids. Extracting and visualizing an explicit surface corresponding to the volume of particles is however a difficult and time-consuming task, especially with increasing particle set sizes. In this paper, we present a novel interactive rendering algorithm for rasterizing a surface which conforms to the particle cloud. We show how projection and blending of overlapping spheres assigned to the particles yields smooth surfaces and discuss how this algorithm can be implemented on the GPU.

The presented rendering algorithm allows rapid high-quality surface visualization for particle-based simulations, without the need to extract an explicit surface representation. Therefore, it has applications for both preview rendering of particle simulations and real-time fluid visualization for interactive applications.