Dynamic particle coating

Physically-based particle models are used by an increasing community of computer graphics researchers and users in order to produce a large variety of dynamic motions. Among all of the methods dedicated to the coating of point models, the implicit surface method has proven to be one of the most powerful. However, for the visualization of a wide variety of objects ranging from smoke to solids, the time-independent coating of traditional implicit surfaces appears to be dynamically too poor and restrictive. We propose a generalization of classic implicit surfaces able to produce a larger variety of particle coatings, from rigid solids to highly deformable objects and even wave propagation and fluid flow coatings, thus handling all these disparate categories with the same paradigm. The method consists of extracting the coating from a field function which is not predetermined but calculated as the modulation of a dynamic discrete medium by particles. For these reasons, the coating behaviors present higher-order dynamic behaviors closely correlated with the dynamics of skeleton particles.