Animation of Water Droplet Flow on Curved Surfaces
Kazufumi Kaneda, Yasuhiko Zuyama, Hideo Yamashita, Tomoyuki Nishita
Proc. PACIFIC GRAPHICS '96, pp. 50-65 (1996)
ABSTRACT
This paper proposes a method for generating a realistic animation of water droplets
and their streams on curved surfaces, such as a windshield,
taking into account the dynamics that act on the droplets.
A water droplet runs down an inclined surface.
The stream meanders down because of impurities on the surface.
Some amount of water remains behind because of the nature of the wetting phenomena.
Therefore, the mass of the droplet decreases,
and the droplet is decelerated as the result.
Finally, the flow stops.
In this paper, a discrete model of curved surfaces is developed
to simulate the streams from the water droplets as described above.
The curved surface is divided into small meshes,
and the flow of water droplets is calculated based on probability of movement.
For rendering scenes to a wide variety of applications,
we also develop two rendering methods:
a fast rendering method using a simple model of water droplets
and a high quality rendering method that pursues the photo-reality.
Animations of water droplets on a windshield or a teapot demonstrate
the usefulness of the proposed method.
Keywords: Animation, Water Droplet Flow, Curved Surface, Discrete Model, Dynamics
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Figure 7: Animation of water droplets on a windshield.
Figure 8: Animation of water droplets on the surface of a teapot.
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