Reconstructing flicker-free surfaces in hybrid particle-grid water simulation: Robust tracking of fluid surfaces using dual marching cubes

Abstract: We present a new method for adaptively extracting flicker-free surfaces from time-varying nonuniform point-set data such as a hybrid particle–grid water simulation. When particles are irregularly distributed in hybrid simulations, degenerate triangles and holes may occur when constructing surfaces adaptively. These abnormal surfaces appear unexpectedly between frames, and we call them “flicker” artifacts (see Fig. 1). In this paper, we address this problem by developing: (1) a kernel-based octree technique to avoid degenerate triangles being created because of size discontinuities between adjacent leaf cells; (2) a level-set error compensation algorithm to avoid apertured water surfaces caused by some particles being lost in the triangulation process; and (3) the extraction of sufficient surface particles for efficient reconstruction of surfaces with extreme amounts of spatial adaptivity. Comparisons with previous methods convincingly demonstrate that our technique successfully reduced flicker artifacts. Graphical abstract: [Figure not available: see fulltext.]