Snow Transport Simulation

Abstract

Whether it is for synthetic scenes in movies or video games, the realism of environments passes by the addition of visual effects common to our experiences. Snow is part of complex natural phenomena that make their physical and visual simulation all the more difficult to treat. In fact, snow falls in scenes under the action of wind. It piles up and is compressed in some areas, breaks and falls, is repelled by wind once deposited, liquefies or evaporates, freezes, accumulates impurities, etc. The goal of this research is to develop a simulator of snow transport in synthetic spaces. This simulator is designed as an automatic tool to integrate snow in scenes by adding its precipitation, transport by wind, simulation of melting and evaporation, but also to offer some control to artists in order to produce the desired results with easy and understandable settings such as the snow precipitation rate or the wind direction and speed in the scene. We propose a method for the simulation of snow transport that consists of

1. A precomputation phase to estimate wind and precipitations in a scene.
2. A physical model of snow transport to capture its evolution through time.
3. A method of implementation on GPU.

Our results demonstrate the need to simulate the various phenomena on the realism of snow distribution.