Interactive Liquid Splash Modeling by User Sketches

Guowei Yan, Zhili Chen, Jimei Yang and Huamin Wang. 2020. Interactive Liquid Splash Modeling by User Sketches. ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH Asia), vol. 39, no. 6, pp. 165:1--165:13.

Splashing is one of the most fascinating liquid phenomena in the real world and it is favored by artists to create stunning visual effects, both statically and dynamically. Unfortunately, the generation of complex and specialized liquid splashes is a challenging task and often requires considerable time and effort. In this paper, we present a novel system that synthesizes realistic liquid splashes from simple user sketch input. Our system adopts a conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) trained with physics-based simulation data to produce raw liquid splash models from input sketches, and then applies model refinement processes to further improve their small-scale details. The system considers not only the trajectory of every user stroke, but also its speed, which makes the splash model simulation-ready with its underlying 3D flow. Compared with simulation-based modeling techniques through trials and errors, our system offers flexibility, convenience and intuition in liquid splash design and editing. We evaluate the usability and the efficiency of our system in an immersive virtual reality environment. Thanks to this system, an amateur user can now generate a variety of realistic liquid splashes in just a few minutes.