Detail-preserving fluid control

We propose a new fluid control technique that uses scale-dependent force control to preserve small-scale fluid detail. Control particles define local force fields and can be generated automatically from either a physical simulation or a sequence of target shapes. We use a multi-scale decomposition of the velocity field and apply control forces only to the coarse-scale components of the flow. Small-scale detail is thus preserved in a natural way avoiding the artificial viscosity often introduced by force-based control methods. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for both Lagrangian and Eulerian fluid simulation environments. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.