Particle based animation of ice melting

A major aim in animation research is to simulate the behaviour of real materials such as melting ice phenomenon. The melting of ice is a natural process of science and can be explained by physic laws which helps to model the transition from solid to liquid. In computer graphics, related theories and laws can be utilized. Recent research efforts on this topic focus on the local melting of materials and the melting of material from directional heat. There are many challenges in the simulation of ice melting. For instance, the melting of ice also includes water animation and interaction between the ice and water. Water may freeze again as it reaches to colder parts of the ice, and the remaining part of the ice may float on top of the melted water. The aim of this study is to simulate the melting of ice by exposure to the directional heat. In this process, the interaction of heat and ice molecules is implemented and a particle-based simulation is performed using Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) technique. The presented approach runs in real-time on CPU and GPU. Keywords: Computer graphics, melting ice, natural phenomena, OpenGL