A new water droplet model using metaball in the gravitational field

摘要

Until now there are many models for rendering water and other fluids, especially to generate t he curved surfaces of flexible objects such as liquids, gases and snow. Metaball formulation is widely used because of its simplicity and flexibility. This paper proposes a new method for generating water droplets, which allows for general deformation in a gravitational field. In previous works, a water droplet was represented by the approximated surfaces of a simple and symmetric metaball, however, the result of the rendered water droplet was far from realistic because it did not consider the effect of gravity on the droplet. We offer a new model for rendering water droplets on a general surface taking into consideration gravity and friction between the droplets and a plane. Our new metaball model uses a inversely deformed deformed droplets by interfacial tension and external force. In several experiments, we could render photo-realistic water droplets with natural-looking shadows.