Physics-based fluid simulation has played an increasingly important role in the computer graphics community. Recent methods in this area have greatly improved the generation of complex visual effects and its computational efficiency. Novel techniques have emerged to deal with complex boundaries, multiphase fluids, gas–liquid interfaces, and fine details. The parallel use of machine learning, image processing, and fluid control technologies has brought many interesting and novel research perspectives. In this survey, we provide an introduction to theoretical concepts underpinning physics-based fluid simulation and their practical implementation, with the aim for it to serve as a guide for both newcomers and seasoned researchers to explore the field of physics-based fluid simulation, with a focus on developments in the last decade. Driven by the distribution of recent publications in the field, we structure our survey to cover physical background; discretization approaches; computational methods that address scalability; fluid interactions with other materials and interfaces; and methods for expressive aspects of surface detail and control. From a practical perspective, we give an overview of existing implementations available for the above methods.

The Iterative Closest Point (ICP) scheme has been widely used for the registration of surfaces and point clouds. However, when working on depth image sequences where there are large geometric planes with small (or even without) details, existing ICP algorithms are prone to tangential drifting and erroneous rotational estimations due to input device errors. In this paper, we propose a novel ICP algorithm that aims to overcome such drawbacks, and provides significantly stabler registration estimation for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) tasks on RGB-D camera inputs. In our approach, the tangential drifting and the rotational estimation error are reduced by: 1) updating the conventional Euclidean distance term with the local geometry information, and 2) introducing a new camera stabilization term that prevents improper camera movement in the calculation. Our approach is simple, fast, effective, and is readily integratable with previous ICP algorithms. We test our new method with the TUM RGB-D SLAM dataset on state-of-the-art real-time 3D dense reconstruction platforms, i.e., ElasticFusion and Kintinuous. Experiments show that our new strategy outperforms all previous ones on various RGB-D data sequences under different combinations of registration systems and solutions.

Realistic animation of various interactions between multiple fluids, possibly undergoing phase change, is a challenging task in computer graphics. The visual scope of multi-phase multi-fluid phenomena covers complex tangled surface structures and rich color variations, which can greatly enhance visual effect in graphics applications. Describing such phenomena requires more complex models to handle challenges involving the calculation of interactions, dynamics and spatial distribution of multiple phases, which are often involved and hard to obtain real-time performance. Recently, a diverse set of algorithms have been introduced to implement the complex multi-fluid phenomena based on the governing physical laws and novel discretization methods to accelerate the overall computation while ensuring numerical stability. By sorting through the target phenomena of recent research in the broad subject of multiple fluids, this state-of-the-art report summarizes recent advances on multi-fluid simulation in computer graphics.

Abstract This article presents a novel and flexible bubble modelling technique for multi-fluid simulations using a volume fraction representation. By combining the volume fraction data obtained from a primary multi-fluid simulation with simple and efficient secondary bubble simulation, a range of real-world bubble phenomena are captured with a high degree of physical realism, including large bubble deformation, sub-cell bubble motion, bubble stacking over the liquid surface, bubble volume change, dissolving of bubbles, etc. Without any change in the primary multi-fluid simulator, our bubble modelling approach is applicable to any multi-fluid simulator based on the volume fraction representation.