Hardware Accelerated Particle Systems
Ansprechpartner: Andreas Kolb
Background
Particle systems have long been recognized as an essential building block
for detail-rich and lively visual environments.
Physically correct particle systems (PS) are designed to add essential
properties to the virtual world. Over the last decades they have been
established as a valuable technique for a variety of applications, e.g.
deformable objects like cloth and volumetric effects.
CPU-implementations can handle up some 10,000 particles in real-time simulations and are mostly
limited by the transfer of particle data from the main processor to the graphics hardware (GPU) for rendering.
This work introduces a full GPU implementation using fragment shaders of
both the simulation and rendering of a dynamically-growing particle system.
Such an implementation can render up to 1 million particles in real-time on
recent hardware. The massively parallel simulation handles collision
detection and reaction of particles with objects for arbitrary shape. The
collision detection is based on depth maps that represent the outer shape of
an object. The depth maps store distance values and normal vectors for
collision reaction. Using a special texture-based indexing technique to
represent normal vectors, standard 8-bit textures can be used to describe
the complete depth map data. Alternately, several depth maps can be stored
in one floating point texture.
In addition, a GPU-based parallel sorting algorithm is introduced that can
be used to perform a depth sorting of the particles for correct alpha
blending.
Papers
| · | N. Cuntz, M. Leidl, A. Kolb, C. Rezk-Salama, M. Böttinger |
| GPU-based Dynamic Flow Visualization for Climate Research Applications |
| In Proc. Simulation and Visualization, 2007, pages 371-384 |
| [bib] [pdf]
|
| · | R. Strzodka, M. Doggett, A. Kolb |
| Scientific Computation for Simulations on Programmable Graphics Hardware |
| In Simulation Practice & Theory, 13(8), 2005, pages 667-680 |
| [bib] [pdf]
|
| · | Andreas Kolb, Nicolas Cuntz |
| Dynamic Particle Coupling for GPU-Based Fluid Simulation |
| In Proc. 18th Symposium on Simulation Technique,, 2005, pages 722-727 |
| [bib] [pdf]
|
| · | Andreas Kolb, Lutz Latta, Christof Rezk-Salama |
| Hardware-based Simulation and Collision Detection for Large Particle Systems |
| In Proc. Graphics Hardware, 2004, pages 123-131 |
| [bib] [pdf]
|
