• Visual Simulation of Ice Crystal Growth
  Proc. ACM SIGGRAPH / Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation 2003

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Abstract:

        The beautiful, branching structure of ice is one of the most striking visual phenomena of the winter landscape. Yet there is little study about modeling this effect in computer graphics. In this paper, we present a novel approach for visual simulation of ice growth. We use a numerical simulation technique from computational physics, the "phase field method," and modify it to allow aesthetic manipulation of ice crystal growth. We present acceleration techniques to achieve interactive simulation performance, as well as a novel geometric sharpening algorithm that removes some of the smoothing artifacts from the implicit representations. We have successfully applied this approach to generate ice crystal growth on 3D object surfaces in several scenes.

For recent results, also see:

• A Hybrid Algorithm for Modeling Ice Formation
• Modeling Ice Dynamics As A Thin-Film Stefan Problem

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• Full-sized images from the paper
• Supplemental Images

• Snow Crystals at Caltech
• Directional Solidification at Cornell
• Parallel Phase Fields at NIST
• General Purpose Computation Using Graphics Hardware

Last Updated 5/28/03