Particle-based dynamic water drops with high surface tension in real time

Abstract

Surface tension has a great influence on the shape of the fluid interface, and is an important physical characteristic in expressing not only liquids but also liquid metals such as mercury and gallium. In the field of physics-based particle fluid simulations, it is a challenging problem to express the high surface tension generated by fluid-air or fluid-solid interaction in real time. The main reasons for this are (1) The magnitude of the force that can be stably expressed in real-time fluid simulation is limited, so when the magnitude of the surface tension increases at a large time-step, the simulation stability decreases, and (2) If we use a small time-step, a stronger force can be expressed. However, it becomes difficult to operate in real time because the computational cost increases. Techniques were proposed to solve this problem for a few specific scenes, but there has not yet been a general approach that can reliably express high surface tension in various scenarios. In this paper, we propose a real-time particle-based fluid simulation framework that can efficiently and stably express high surface tension. Unlike the previous methods, we newly model the surface tension so that the strong surface tension force generated in the droplet area with a large curvature is applied evenly in the normal and tangent directions regardless of the size of the droplet. We also propose new pressure constraints that converge quickly and accurately using this force. Our method can be effectively used in various physics-based simulation scenarios because it can easily express and control surface tension effects that appear in materials such as liquid metal as well as water.