Recycling plant for water animations

At SIGGRAPH, the leading computer graphics conference taking place in Vancouver from August 10 to 14, IST Austria Assistant Professor Chris Wojtan and his colleagues Karthik Raveendran (Georgia Tech), Nils Thuerey (TU Munich) and Greg Turk (Georgia Tech) present a method for creating new animations from existing ones.

In his research, Chris Wojtan focuses on the animation of liquids such as water, for which it is extremely difficult to achieve a realistic impression. Producing an animation with a specific behavior requires a degree of trial and error. So far, this has been solved by producing several simulations to find the one that fits best. To streamline this process, Chris Wojtan and colleagues present a method which blends smoothly between existing animations, instantly creating hundreds of new simulations.

Their new method semi-automatically matches two existing liquid animations. From this, new simulations that are intermediates of the input simulations can be created immediately. The new animations are not only synthesized instantly, as the method is based on interpolating between existing animations, they are also realistic. As the new animations are generated quickly – as fast as the frame rate – they can be produced on the fly, with potential applications in computer games or training simulators.

Examples can be found here: http://www.prism.gatech.edu/~kraveendran3/research/BlendingLiquids/