Interactive High-Resolution Simulation of Granular Material

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.