Animating sand as a fluid

• DOI: 10.1145/1073204.1073298
• Publication Date: 2005-11-07T16:00:45Z
• Authors: Yongning Zhu; Robert Bridson
• Keywords: 0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; 02 engineering and technology

We present a physics-based simulation method for animating sand. To allow for efficiently scaling up to large volumes of sand, we abstract away the individual grains and think of the sand as a continuum. In particular we show that an existing water simulator can be turned into a sand simulator with only a few small additions to account for inter-grain and boundary friction.We also propose an alternative method for simulating fluids. Our core representation is a cloud of particles, which allows for accurate and flexible surface tracking and advection, but we use an auxiliary grid to efficiently enforce boundary conditions and incompressibility. We further address the issue of reconstructing a surface from particle data to render each frame.