A heuristic approach to the simulation of water drops and flows on glass panes

•Adopt an ID map for efficiently merging water drops and water flows.•Apply smoothing and erosion operators for simulating water drops and water flows.•Produce residual water droplets realistically.

Water drops and water flows exhibit interesting motion behavior. In this paper, we adopt a simple but effective approach for simulating this behavior on glass panes in a physically plausible manner. We combine a particle system and a height map to compute their movements and shapes. Our approach efficiently handles the merging of water drops and the formation of residual water droplets. We report our results for several examples of water behavior simulated in real time. The experimental results show that our system simulates water drops and water flows with high quality.

Graphical abstractThe stages of the simulation method of water drops and water flows.Figure optionsDownload full-size imageDownload high-quality image (262 K)Download as PowerPoint slide