Interactive rendering of giga-particle fluid simulations

We describe the design of an interactive rendering system for particle-based fluid simulations comprising hundreds of millions of particles per time step. We present a novel binary voxel representation for particle positions in combination with random jitter to drastically reduce memory and bandwidth requirements. To avoid a time-consuming preprocess and restrict the workload to what is seen, the construction of this representation is embedded into front-to-back GPU ray-casting. For high speed rendering, we ray-cast spheres and extend on total-variation-based image de-noising models to smooth the fluid surface according to data specific boundary conditions. The regular voxel structure permits highly efficient ray-sphere intersection testing as well as classification of foam particles at runtime on the GPU. Foam particles are rendered volumetrically by reconstructing densities from the binary representation on-the-fly. The particular design of our system allows scrubbing through high-resolution animated fluids at interactive rates.