Example-based synthesis of turbulence by flow field style transfer

The computational cost of physically-based fluid simulation for generating realistic animations is expensive. Therefore, it takes a long time for an animator to create the desired animation. To reduce such costs, several methods have been developed that employ an approach in which turbulence is synthesized as a post process. Since, with this approach, global motion can be obtained using low-resolution fluid simulation, realistic animations with the desired behavior can be created at low cost. In the field of image editing, style transfer methods, which can efficiently achieve the desired stylization by transferring features of an example image to a user-specified image, have been proposed. We combine these concepts and present a novel style transfer method for turbulence by reusing the existing fluid animations. Our system allows the user to transfer turbulent motion from one flow field to other flow fields. We do this by extending example-based image synthesis methods to the flow field: a patch-based synthesis and an optimization-based texture synthesis. Our method is designed such that the resulting flow fields satisfy the incompressibility condition. Our method can intuitively and easily create high-resolution fluid animations with the desired turbulent motion.