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Photorealistic visualization and fluid animation: coupling of Maya with a two-phase Navier-Stokes fluid solver

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Computing and Visualization in Science

Abstract

We have coupled the three-dimensional solver for the two-phase incompressible Navier-Stokes equations NaSt3DGPF with Autodesk Maya. Maya is the industry standard software framework for the creation of three-dimensional animations. The parallel level-set-based fluid solver NaSt3DGPF simulates the interaction of two fluids like air and water. It uses high-order finite difference discretization methods that are designed for physics applications. By coupling both applications, we are now able to set up scientific fluid simulations in an easy-to-use user interface. Moreover, the rendering techniques provided by Maya allow us to create photorealistic visualizations for computational fluid dynamics problems and support the creation of highly visually realistic fluid simulations for animation movies. Altogether, we obtain an easy usable and fully coupled fluid animation toolkit for two-phase fluid simulations. These are the first published results of the full integration of a physics-oriented, high-order grid-based parallel two-phase fluid solver in Maya, at least to our knowledge.

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Notes

  1. During the review process of this article, we became aware of a previously unavailable Autodesk Maya software version, which now has two-phase flow animation support. However, technical details, the parallelization and the achievable quality of this extension are unclear.

  2. This is at least valid for the software version of Maya (2011) that was available during the software development for this paper.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported in parts by the Sonder- forschungsbereich 611 Singular phenomena and scaling in mathematical models funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

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  1. Institute for Numerical Simulation, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany

    Peter Zaspel & Michael Griebel

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  1. Peter Zaspel
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  2. Michael Griebel
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Correspondence to Peter Zaspel.

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Communicated by: Arnold Reuskan.

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Zaspel, P., Griebel, M. Photorealistic visualization and fluid animation: coupling of Maya with a two-phase Navier-Stokes fluid solver. Comput. Visual Sci. 14, 371–383 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00791-013-0188-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00791-013-0188-1

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