research-article

Pahi: A Unified Water Pipeline and Toolset

Authors:

Alexey Stomakhin,

Johnathan Nixon,

Nicholas Illingworth,

Douglas MchaleAuthors Info & Claims

DigiPro '23: Proceedings of the 2023 Digital Production Symposium

Article No.: 11, Pages 1 - 13

https://doi.org/10.1145/3603521.3604291

Published: 05 August 2023 Publication History

Abstract

We present Pahi, a unified water pipeline and toolset for visual effects production. It covers procedural blocking visualization for preproduction, simulation of various water phenomena from large-scale splashes with airborne spray and mist, underwater bubbles and foam to small-scale ripples, thin film and drips, and a compositing system to combine different elements together for rendering. Rather than prescribing a one-size-fits-all solution, Pahi encompasses a number of state-of-the-art techniques from reference engineering-grade solvers to highly art-directable tools. We do a deep dive into the technical aspects of Pahi components and their interaction, and discuss practical aspects of its use on Avatar: The Way of Water. We were honored to be awarded the Visual Effects Society (VES) 2023 Emerging Technology Award for this work.

References

[1]

Christopher Batty and Robert Bridson. 2008. Accurate Viscous Free Surfaces for Buckling, Coiling, and Rotating Liquids. In Proceedings of the 2008 ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation (Dublin, Ireland) (SCA ’08). Eurographics Association, Goslar, DEU, 219–228.

Digital Library

[2]

Robert Bridson. 2015. Fluid simulation for computer graphics. CRC press.

Digital Library

[3]

G. Daviet and F. Bertails-Descoubes. 2017. Simulation of Drucker–Prager granular flows inside Newtonian fluids. (Feb. 2017). Working paper or preprint.

[4]

Luc Deike, W Kendall Melville, and Stéphane Popinet. 2016. Air entrainment and bubble statistics in breaking waves. J. Fluid Mech. 801 (Aug. 2016), 91–129.

[5]

Luca Fascione, Johannes Hanika, Mark Leone, Marc Droske, Jorge Schwarzhaupt, Tomáš Davidovič, Andrea Weidlich, and Johannes Meng. 2018. Manuka: A Batch-Shading Architecture for Spectral Path Tracing in Movie Production. ACM Trans. Graph. 37, 3, Article 31 (aug 2018), 18 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3182161

Digital Library

[6]

Florian Ferstl, Ryoichi Ando, Chris Wojtan, Rüdiger Westermann, and Nils Thuerey. 2016. Narrow Band FLIP for Liquid Simulations. In Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference of the European Association for Computer Graphics (Lisbon, Portugal) (EG ’16). Eurographics Association, Goslar, DEU, 225–232.

Digital Library

[7]

Chuyuan Fu, Qi Guo, Theodore Gast, Chenfanfu Jiang, and Joseph Teran. 2017. A Polynomial Particle-in-Cell Method. ACM Trans. Graph. 36, 6, Article 222 (nov 2017), 12 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3130800.3130878

Digital Library

[8]

Jonathan Garcia, Sara Drakeley, Sean Palmer, Erin Ramos, David Hutchins, Ralf Habel, and Alexey Stomakhin. 2016. Rigging the Oceans of Disney’s "Moana". In SIGGRAPH ASIA 2016 Technical Briefs (Macau) (SA ’16). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 30, 4 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3005358.3005379

Digital Library

[9]

Christopher J. Horvath. 2015. Empirical Directional Wave Spectra for Computer Graphics(DigiPro ’15). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 29–39. https://doi.org/10.1145/2791261.2791267

Digital Library

[10]

Richard Jones and Richard Southern. 2017. Physically-Based Droplet Interaction(SCA ’17). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 5, 10 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3099564.3099573

Digital Library

[11]

Steve Lesser, Alexey Stomakhin, Gilles Daviet, Joel Wretborn, John Edholm, Noh-Hoon Lee, Eston Schweickart, Xiao Zhai, Sean Flynn, and Andrew Moffat. 2022. Loki: A Unified Multiphysics Simulation Framework for Production. ACM Trans. Graph. 41, 4, Article 50 (jul 2022), 20 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3528223.3530058

Digital Library

[12]

Ken Museth. 2013. VDB: High-Resolution Sparse Volumes with Dynamic Topology. ACM Trans. Graph. 32, 3, Article 27 (jul 2013), 22 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/2487228.2487235

Digital Library

[13]

Sean Palmer, Jonathan Garcia, Sara Drakeley, Patrick Kelly, and Ralf Habel. 2017. The Ocean and Water Pipeline of Disney’s Moana. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2017 Talks (Los Angeles, California) (SIGGRAPH ’17). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 29, 2 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3084363.3085067

Digital Library

[14]

Saket Patkar, Mridul Aanjaneya, Dmitriy Karpman, and Ronald Fedkiw. 2013. A hybrid Lagrangian-Eulerian formulation for bubble generation and dynamics. In Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation (Anaheim, California) (SCA ’13). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 105–114.

Digital Library

[15]

Manuele Sabbadin and Marc Droske. 2021. Ray Tracing of Blobbies. Apress, Berkeley, CA, 551–568. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-7185-8_35

[16]

Tomas Skrivan, Andreas Soderstrom, John Johansson, Christoph Sprenger, Ken Museth, and Chris Wojtan. 2020. Wave Curves: Simulating Lagrangian Water Waves on Dynamically Deforming Surfaces. ACM Trans. Graph. 39, 4, Article 65 (aug 2020), 12 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3386569.3392466

Digital Library

[17]

Alexey Stomakhin, Andrew Moffat, and Gary Boyle. 2019. A Practical Guide to Thin Film and Drips Simulation. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2019 Talks (Los Angeles, California) (SIGGRAPH ’19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 72, 2 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3306307.3328141

Digital Library

[18]

Alexey Stomakhin and Andrew Selle. 2017. Fluxed Animated Boundary Method. ACM Trans. Graph. 36, 4, Article 68 (jul 2017), 8 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3072959.3073597

Digital Library

[19]

Alexey Stomakhin, Joel Wretborn, Kevin Blom, and Gilles Daviet. 2020. Underwater Bubbles and Coupling. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2020 Talks (Virtual Event, USA) (SIGGRAPH ’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 2, 2 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3388767.3407390

Digital Library

[20]

Joel Wretborn, Sean Flynn, and Alexey Stomakhin. 2022. Guided Bubbles and Wet Foam for Realistic Whitewater Simulation. ACM Trans. Graph. 41, 4, Article 117 (jul 2022), 16 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3528223.3530059

Digital Library

[21]

Jihun Yu and Greg Turk. 2013. Reconstructing Surfaces of Particle-Based Fluids Using Anisotropic Kernels. ACM Trans. Graph. 32, 1, Article 5 (feb 2013), 12 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/2421636.2421641

Digital Library

Cited By

Flynn SStomakhin AWretborn JWhite D(2024)Art Directable Underwater Explosion SimulationACM SIGGRAPH 2024 Talks10.1145/3641233.3664314(1-2)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3641233.3664314
Zhao CShinar TSchroeder CKry PCani MSkouras MWang H(2024)Reconstruction of Implicit Surfaces from Fluid Particles using Convolutional Neural NetworksProceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation10.1111/cgf.15181(1-13)Online publication date: 21-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1111/cgf.15181

Index Terms

Pahi: A Unified Water Pipeline and Toolset
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Computer graphics
    1. Animation
      1. Physical simulation
  2. Modeling and simulation
    1. Simulation types and techniques

Recommendations

Characteristics and Evaluation for Nitrogen Pollution in Water and Surface Sediments of Xixi Wetland
ISDEA '13: Proceedings of the 2013 Third International Conference on Intelligent System Design and Engineering Applications

In this paper, it was investigated and evaluated about characteristics of nitrogen pollution for 11 sampling water or surface sediments (0~10cm) in Hang Zhou Xixi Wetland, and correlation analysis was conducted amongst nitrogen indexes for water and ...
Application of the SWAP model to simulate water-salt transport under deficit irrigation with saline water

The agro-hydrological Soil-Water-Atmosphere-Plant (SWAP) model was calibrated and validated to simulate water-salt transport based on field experiments in an arid region of China. The simulation results show lower soil water content but higher salt ...
The ocean and water pipeline of Disney's Moana
SIGGRAPH '17: ACM SIGGRAPH 2017 Talks

Disney's Moana was the largest and most complex water project the studio had ever undertaken. Over 900 shots required ocean interaction, which included boat wakes, splashes, shorelines, walls of water, and highly art-directed sentient water. Our ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

DigiPro '23: Proceedings of the 2023 Digital Production Symposium

August 2023

84 pages

ISBN:9798400702389

DOI:10.1145/3603521

Editors:
Valérie Bernard
Animal Logic
,
Kelsey Hurley
Walt Disney Animation Studios
,
Cyrus Wilson,
Per Christensen
Pixar Animation Studios

Copyright © 2023 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Sponsors

SIGGRAPH: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 05 August 2023

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article
Research
Refereed limited

Conference

DigiPro '23

Sponsor:

SIGGRAPH

DigiPro '23: The Digital Production Symposium

August 5, 2023

CA, Los Angeles, USA

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

2
Total Citations
View Citations
252
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)109
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)16

Reflects downloads up to 25 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Flynn SStomakhin AWretborn JWhite D(2024)Art Directable Underwater Explosion SimulationACM SIGGRAPH 2024 Talks10.1145/3641233.3664314(1-2)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3641233.3664314
Zhao CShinar TSchroeder CKry PCani MSkouras MWang H(2024)Reconstruction of Implicit Surfaces from Fluid Particles using Convolutional Neural NetworksProceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation10.1111/cgf.15181(1-13)Online publication date: 21-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1111/cgf.15181

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

HTML Format

View this article in HTML Format.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents