View-Dependent Adaptive Animation of Liquids

Various adaptive mesh refinement techniques are often employed in numerical simulations for increasing spatial and temporal resolution beyond the limits imposed by available CPU time and memory space. Recently, an octree-based adaptive mesh structure was successfully used in fluid animation to place more grid cells efficiently in visually interesting regions of fluids. In an attempt to optimize the use of computational resources further in fluid animation, this paper extends this adaptive technique by modifying the mesh refinement scheme so that the camera's viewing properties are dynamically exploited during the simulation. Based on a simple adaptive mesh structure, we show that the new meshing strategy can save a substantial amount of computation time and memory space by using a view-dependent adaptive approach. The experimental results reveal that the proposed technique provides a good compromise between the computational effort and the simulation's fidelity, and may be used quite effectively in 3D animation production.