Mapping Volumetric Meshes to Point-based Motion Models

Particle-based models produce various, flexible and optimized animations. Intrinsically, they are neither based on a boundary representation nor on volumetric objet meshed representations. Thus, they raise rendering issues since they do not contain enough geometrical information and do not even provide an underlying spatial topology. Consequently, various geometrical shapes can be used to render a motion produced by a meshless model, leading to different visual interpretations. To our knowledge, there is no generic methods to associate any set of points in motion with a topology-based geometric model. In this paper, we propose a framework to map arbitrary volumetric meshes to arbitrary point-based motions and to control the topological changes. Therefore, from only one motion description, different visual results can be obtained. This framework breaks down into three distinct processes: a particles to vertices mapping, the definition of a motion function and the definition of topological modifications and events triggering them. We show how the manipulation of these parameters allows to experiment different mappings for a particular motion and that our framework includes most of previous known mappings.