A Novel Method for Simulating Micro-Scale Water Droplet Movements

Micro-scale fluids are tiny droplets that adhere to the surface of an object as a result of rainfall, perspiration, etc. Micro-scale fluid simulation is widely used in fields such as film and games. The existing state-of-the-art simulation methods are not suitable for simulating water droplets moving on a surface due to the fact that the water droplets cannot leave the texture space and their movements always depend on the continuous UV region. In this study, a novel method for simulating water droplets moving on a surface is proposed. We divide the droplets into two types: (1) two-dimensional droplets and (2) three-dimensional droplets and we implement the transformation between two-dimensional droplets in the texture space and three-dimensional droplets in the physical space. In the preprocessing phase, jump textures, coordinate transform textures and force field textures are generated in the non-continuous UV regions on a 3D object’s surface. In the process of simulation, water droplets are treated as rigid particles. The Velocity-Verlet-based method is adopted to solve the motion trajectory equation, and the boundary droplet transport algorithm is implemented based on jump texture. In the process of rendering, the height map is generated according to the simulation in the texture space and then the liquid bridge phenomenon between the droplets is simulated based on the Gaussian blur and the color rank algorithm. Finally, they are converted into normal texture-rendering droplets. The experimental result shows that the proposed method works well when simulating the movements of water droplets on a surface in a real-time manner, and it makes the movement simulation of dimension-reducing water droplets no longer depend on the continuous surface and continuous UV region. Moreover, the simulation efficiency of the proposed method is two times higher than that of the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method.