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Comment by mizzao | Hacker News Reader

That looks pretty @%(*ing compelling. Does anyone know how novel this is, and whether it would be computationally feasible to implement in real time (e.g. video games?)

I could already see it being very useful in for offline 3D animation, such as animated movies.

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Thanks! At this point, since this is really the first version of a new and different technique than is typical in graphics, the method is not near real-time. As you suggest, the offline setting is probably the most relevant for now. We are hopeful that future research may substantially accelerate it.

Reminds of the work Ken Brakke has done with his Surface Evolver [0]. It's ancient, and it parses files written in it's own weird ini-like language [1] (seriously!?). If only it exposed a decent API (which would lend itself to e.g a python wrapper), it'd be the easiest thing on earth to use.

[0] http://facstaff.susqu.edu/brakke/evolver/evolver.html [1] http://facstaff.susqu.edu/brakke/evolver/html/datafile.htm

Yes, there is a fair amount of similarly and connection in the underlying mesh data structure. In fact, we published a paper on that aspect of the framework at SIGGRAPH a couple years back, which heavily cites the Surface Evolver work. http://www.cs.columbia.edu/cg/multitracker/

It is novel as it is an accepted paper to SIGGRAPH, generally considered to be the top computer graphics conference.

I've pinged Christopher Batty, one of the co-authors, to come here and answer questions. :)

Dr. Batty does have experience with offline 3D fluid simulators for movies: https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~c2batty/

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