Dear Fellow Scholars, this is Two Minute Papers with Dr. Károly Zsolnai-Fehér.
Through the power of computer graphics research works, today, it is possible to simulate honey
coiling, water flow with debris, or even get a neural network to look at these simulations
and learn how to continue them!
Now, if we look under the hood, we see that not all, but many of these simulations contain
particles.
And our task is to simulate the pressure, velocity, and other physical quantities for
these particles and create a surface where we can watch the evolution of their movement.
Once again, the simulations are typically based on particles.
But not this new technique.
Look.
It takes a coarse simulation, well, this one is not too exciting.
So why are we looking at this?
Well, look!
Whoa!
The new method can add these crispy, high-frequency details to it.
And the result is an absolutely beautiful simulation.
And it does not use millions and millions of particles to get this done.
In fact, it does not use any particles at all!
Instead, it uses wave curves.
These are curve-shaped wave-packets that can enrich a coarse wave simulation and improve
it a great deal to create a really detailed, crisp output.
And it gets even better, because these wave curves can be applied as a simple post processing
step.
What this means is that the workflow what you saw here really works like that.
When we have a coarse simulation that is already done, and we are not happy with it, with many
other existing methods, it is time to simulate the whole thing again from scratch, but not
here.
With this one, we can just add all this detail to an already existing simulation.
Wow.
Loving it.
Note that the surface of the fluid is made opaque so that we can get a better view of
the waves.
Of course, the final simulations that we get for production use are transparent, like the
one you see here.
Now, another interesting detail is that that the execution time is linear with respect
to the curve points.
So what does that mean?
Well, let’s have a look together.
In the first scenario, we get a low-quality underlying simulation, and we add a 100 thousand
wave curves.
This takes approximately 10 seconds and looks like this.
This already greatly enhanced the quality of the results, but we can decide to add more.
So, first case, a 100k wave curves, in 10-ish seconds.
Now comes the linear part - if we decide that we are yearning for a little more, we can
run 200k wave curves, and the execution time will be 20-ish seconds.
It looks like this.
Better, we’re getting there!
And for a 400k wave curves, 40-ish seconds, and for 800k curves, yes, you guessed it right,
80-ish seconds.
Double the number of curves, double the execution time.
This is what the linear scaling part means.
Now, of course, not even this technique is perfect.
The post-processing nature of the method means that it can enrich the underlying simulation
a great deal, but, it cannot add changes that are too intrusive to it.
It can only add small waves relative to the size of the fluid domain.
But even with these, the value proposition of this paper is just out of this world.
So, from now on, if we have a relatively poor quality fluid simulation that we abandoned
years ago, we don’t need to despair.
What we need is to harness the power of wave curves.
Thanks for watching and for your generous support, and I'll see you next time!