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Chen Shen, Apurva Shah
Abstract:
From pouring sauces to sudsy sink water to violent sewer rapids, realistic animation of fluids presented interesting challenges in Ratatouille. The various fluid effects were simulated either using a physically-based solver or directly with generic particle systems.
Although the simulated particles move as a whole like a fluid, the number of particles was too small to give the appearance of a continuous
surface if rendered directly. To address this, we developed a technique to efficiently extract temporally and spatially coherent surfaces from particles with parametrization that allows textural details to be later added in rendering.
Paper (PDF)
Available as Pixar Technical Memo #07-05