Vector fluid: a vector graphics depiction of surface flow

Abstract

We present a simple technique for creating fluid silhouettes described with vector graphics, which we call "Vector Fluid." In our system, a solid region in the fluid is represented as a closed contour and advected by fluid flow to form a curly and clear shape similar to marbling or sumi-nagashi (See Figure 1). The fundamental principle behind our method is that contours of solid regions should not collide. This means that if the initial shape of the region is a concave polygon, that shape should maintain its topology so that it can be rendered as a regular concave polygon, no matter how irregularly the contour is distorted by advection. In contrast to other techniques, our approach explicitly neglects topology changes to track surfaces in a trade off of computational cost and complexity. We also introduce an adaptive contour sampling technique to reduce this extra cost. We explore specific examples in 2D for art oriented usage and show applications and robustness of our method to exhibit organic fluid components. We also demonstrate how to port our entire algorithm onto a GPU to boost interactive performance for complex scenes.