We present a method for smoothly blending between existing liquid animations. We introduce a semi-automatic method for matching two existing liquid animations, which we use to create new fluid motion that plausibly interpolates the input. Our contributions include a new space-time non-rigid iterative closest point algorithm that incorporates user guidance, a subsampling technique for efficient registration of meshes with millions of vertices, and a fast surface extraction algorithm that produces 3D triangle meshes from a 4D space-time surface. Our technique can be used to instantly create hundreds of new simulations, or to interactively explore complex parameter spaces. Our method is guaranteed to produce output that does not deviate from the input animations, and it generalizes to multiple dimensions. Because our method runs at interactive rates after the initial precomputation step, it has potential applications in games and training simulations.
Snapshots from nine different animations that were created by varing the wall width and the wall height of a damn break. All results were created by our blending fluid method, and only four original animations were used as input.
This material is based in part upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grants IIS-11130934. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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