GPU-based Real Time Marbling Texture Simulation

Marbling is a traditional art loved by people all over the world for centuries. The process of marbling is characterized by the manipulation of floating pigment, and the transfer of the resulting design on paper or some other material. With the traditional marbling, the designing process and the quality of resulting designs are largely constrained by various physical conditions.In this paper, we provide an exploration into marbling process and shows how this traditional art can be simulated algorithmically. The major part of our simulation is built on the physical model of the real marbling, i.e. a 2D fluid dynamics simulation. This enables us to generate realistic marbling designs. Intricate designs are generated as the result of color advection in the 2D flow fields obtained by numerically solving the Navier-Stokes equations on the GPU with a multigrid solver. An additional image sharpening scheme is adopted to make the resulting artwork much more brilliant. Thanks to the large amount of parallelism in modern graphics hardware, we are able to implement an interactive computer system which provides a real-time environment for users to design their own virtual patterning tools and exploit the best designs through trial and error. Procedurally generated marbling textures can also be used for rendering objects and scenes directly.