Art direction of high resolution naturalistic liquid simulations is notoriously hard, due to both the chaotic nature of the physics and the computational resources required. Resimulating a scene at higher resolution often produces very different results, and is too expensive to allow many design cycles. We present a method of constraining or guiding a high resolution liquid simulation to stay close to a finalized low resolution version (either simulated or directly animated), restricting the solve to a thin outer shell of liquid around a guide shape. Our method is generally faster than an unconstrained simulation and can be integrated with a standard fluid simulator. We demonstrate several applications, with both simulated and hand-animated inputs.
Guide Shapes for High Resolution Naturalistic Liquid Simulation