Packing the water pipe

Abstract

From huge tidal waves to complex character interactions, FLIP fluid simulations based on volumes and particles have become a key aspect of a modern water pipeline. OpenVDB has recently introduced efficient sparse volumes to production to reduce storage and memory requirements for volumes. We build on this goal with new lossless and lossy particle compression schemes designed to significantly reduce the memory, storage and I/O bandwidth associated with processing large particle sets for simulation and rendering.