Physically-Based Music Fountain Simulation

The simulation of natural sceneries is a hot research topic in the field of visual simulation. It is extremely challenging to simulate dynamic natural sceneries such as clouds, fog, smoke, snow, water flow and sparkles, since it is very difficult to model their shapes and motions with traditional modeling techniques. In general, there are two ways to simulate natural sceneries. One is to make use of physically based modeling techniques. The other is to use particle systems.Many successful algorithms have been proposed to simulate natural sceneries in the past decades. However, there are few works to visually present dynamic artificial sceneries such as fountain. In this paper, the realistic simulation of music fountain is explored. In the simulated musical fountain, the motion of water flows is controlled by music. The difficulty lies in the synchronization of the music and fountain motion. A physically based approach for real time fountain simulation is presented based on fluid dynamics and particle system. Unlike traditional methods which need numerically solve complex Navier-Stokes equations, a special case of Navier-Stokes equations is adopted and particles are used to model fountain geometry. Music intensity is used to synchronize the motion of fountain particles, and simple dynamics equations of particles are used to simulate realistic fountain behavior. A simple yet efficient wind model is also proposed to further enhance the simulation of the fountain behavior. A user-friendly interface is developed to facilitate interactive adjustment for fountain simulation parameters. In order to achieve visually aesthetic effects, particles are rendered as blobby surfaces through ray tracing.