Interactive High-Resolution Simulation of Granular Material

TL;DR

This paper presents a real-time, particle-based simulation method for granular materials that efficiently handles up to 500,000 particles on consumer CPUs, suitable for interactive applications.

Contribution

A novel two-step simulation approach that decouples accurate small-scale simulation from efficient large-scale sampling, enabling high-resolution granular simulation in real time.

Findings

Simulates up to 500,000 particles interactively on CPUs.

Uses a two-step decoupled method for accuracy and efficiency.

Achieves robustness with large time steps for real-time performance.

Abstract

We introduce a particle-based simulation method for granular material in interactive frame rates. We divide the simulation into two decoupled steps. In the first step, a relatively small number of particles is accurately simulated with a constraint-based method. Here, all collisions and the resulting friction between the particles are taken into account. In the second step, the small number of particles is significantly increased by an efficient sampling algorithm without creating additional artifacts. The method is particularly robust and allows relatively large time steps, which makes it well suited for real-time applications. With our method, up to 500k particles can be computed in interactive frame rates on consumer CPUs without relying on GPU support for massive parallel computing. This makes it well suited for applications where a lot of GPU power is already needed for render tasks.