Example-based turbulence style transfer

Abstract

Generating realistic fluid simulations remains computationally expensive, and animators can expend enormous effort trying to achieve a desired motion. To reduce such costs, several methods have been developed in which highresolution turbulence is synthesized as a post process. Since global motion can then be obtained using a fast, low-resolution simulation, less effort is needed to create a realistic animation with the desired behavior. While much research has focused on accelerating the low-resolution simulation, the problem controlling the behavior of the turbulent, high-resolution motion has received little attention. In this paper,we showthat style transfer methods from image editing can be adapted to transfer the turbulent style of an existing fluid simulation onto a new one. We do this by extending examplebased image synthesis methods to handle velocity fields using a combination of patch-based and optimization-based texture synthesis. This approach allows us to take into account the incompressibility condition, which we have found to be a important factor during synthesis. Using our method, a user can easily and intuitively create high-resolution fluid animations that have a desired turbulent motion.