NCCA Animation Archive

Simulating Air Bubbles for Computer Generated fluids

Most of the available literature on fluid simulations has not included air bubbles. This paper presents a technique to add air bubbles to a pre-computed or dynamically calculated fluid simulation. Bubbles form naturally in splashing water so the omission of bubbles detracts from the believability and visual realism of a fluid simulation. In this paper I propose a particle-based system that can be implemented with any particlebased simulation of a fluid. The bubble particles are only created where needed and their movement is then dynamically simulated according to the flow of the fluid into which they are introduced.