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.
We demonstrate our method on data generated by a
variety of fluid simulation techniques and simple particle systems.
H. Bhattacharya, Y. Gao, A. W. Bargteil
"A Level-set Method for Skinning Animated Particle Data."
In ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation 2011