The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

Fluid simulations typically produce complex three-dimensional iso-surfaces whose geometry and topology change over time. The standard way of representing such dynamic geometry is by a set of iso-surfaces that are extracted individually at certain time steps. An alternative strategy is to represent the whole sequence as a four-dimensional tetrahedral mesh. The iso-surface at a specific time step can then be computed by intersecting the tetrahedral mesh with a three-dimensional hyperplane. This not only allows to animate the surface continuously over time without having to worry about the topological changes, but also enables simplification algorithms to exploit temporal coherence. I will show how to interactively render such four-dimensional tetrahedral meshes by improving previous GPU-accelerated techniques and building an out-of-core multi-resolution structure based on quadric-error simplification. As a second application I will show how to apply the framework to time-varying surfaces that result from morphing one triangle mesh into another