A Level-Set Method for Skinning Animated Particle Data

In this paper, we present a straightforward, easy to implement method for particle skinning—generating surfaces from animated particle data. We cast the problem in terms of constrained optimization and solve the optimization using a level-set approach. The optimization seeks to minimize the thin-plate energy of the surface, while staying between surfaces defined by the union of spheres centered at the particles. Our approach skins each frame independently while preserving the temporal coherence of the underlying particle animation. Thus, it is well-suited for environments where particle skinning is treated as a post-process, with each frame generated in parallel. Moreover, our approach is integrated with the OpenVDB library and the underlying partial differential equation is amenable to implicit time integration. We demonstrate our method on data generated by a variety of fluid simulation techniques and simple particle systems.