Paper presentations III

Thoughts

• The octree-based simulator was pretty impressive, although I’m a bit surprised nobody has made a (practical) implementation like this before. The discritization rules across octree resolutions seemed like pretty straightforward generalizations of the Eulerian uniform grid rules.
• Ferrofluid simulation is super cool, and I would have thought you needed all the volumetric information in order to compute the magnetically coupled effects. The main insight (it seems) was that for fluids with zero viscosity, the surface velocity fully determines the interior - I guess this makes sense, since any changes can propagate instantly in order to make the interior a harmonic interpolation. The results were super impressive, and I could see this inspiring cool organic generation/art with their maze forming example.
• I don’t think I understood all of the soap film dynamics paper, but it was cool that they compared results directly with real world phenomena and showed pretty compelling results. Were they rendering their soap films in a spectrally correct manner (leading to the color patterns), or was this more of a false-color curl visualization?
• Similar thoughts for bubble rings & ink chandeliers paper - super compelling results when compared to the real thing (at least for bubble rings, ink chandeliers looked a bit worse). I wonder how they matched the initial conditions so closely. The math here was very complex, but the main idea of computing evolution in the primary configuration space of the filament was interesting.
• Lastly, the snow paper. This one seemed pretty poplar, and gave very high performance results compared to other papers, but I didn’t think the results were actually that compelling - the snow looked too stiff and flat. I suppose that could be partly due to the opaque rendering, but the fracturing behavior also looked a bit more like soft styrofoam than snow. In any case, it is still pretty impressive to capture this behavior with relatively basic SPH rules, giving the high performance. I wonder if they can improve it to mach e.g. Disney’s snow from Frozen.