Melting
Overview
The purpose of this project is to design a simple, linear 3D cellular automata approach for animating the melting process of solid volumetric models. Accurate modeling of object melting usually requires complicated physical simulations of heat transfer and phase transition from solid to liquid. Instead, we propose a simplified model to describe the melting behaviors of highly viscous objects, such as wax, lava, plastic, metal and chocolate. We simulate the process by which a volumetric solid transforms into a viscous liquid as the amount of heat it accumulates on its surface reaches a certain temperature. We then animate smooth fluid behavior using a cellular automata. The dynamic volume data is rendered directly on texture mapping hardware to achieve an interactive speed.
Current Results
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Here we show a sequence of a cello, made of tin alloy, heated by a heat source located at the front upper right. Users can interactively modify the location and intensity of the heat source using the keyboard. The size of the cello volume is 107X127X107. The average simulation time for each time step is 15.6ms and the time for updating the volume model, low-pass filtering and transfer of the modified portion of the volume from host memory to graphics memory is 65.8ms per frame. |
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Here we simulate a chocolate goblet in a hot oven. In this example, conduction and convection are considered as the main heat transfer method. The top portion of the goblet is melted first. The highly viscous liquid drips down along the remaining solid parts. Eventually, the whole goblet is melted. The size of the goblet volume is 141X94X141. The average simulation time needed for this animation is 21.6ms for each "spreading" step, and 83.8ms for the updating time per frame. |
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The above figure show the images of the lava flow volume from two different view angles. The user can also interactively control when and where the lava is generated at the top of the mountain. The size of the volcano terrain model is 128X100X128. The CA model generates a time-varying lava flow volume. The average simulation time needed for this application is 24.8ms for each step, and 90.2ms for the updating time per frame. |
Future Work