Abstract We present a new system for interactive dendritic painting. Dendritic painting is characterized by the unique and intricate branching patterns that grow from the interaction of inks, solvents and medium. Painting sessions thus become very dynamic and experimental. To achieve a compelling simulation of this painting technique we introduce a new Reaction‐Diffusion model with carefully designed terms to allow natural interactions in a painting context. We include additional user control not possible in the real world to guide and constrain the growth of the patterns in expressive ways. Our multi‐field model is able to capture and simulate all these complex phenomena efficiently in real time, expanding the tools available to the digital artist, while producing compelling animations for motion graphics.

We propose a method to simulate the rich, scale-dependent dynamics of water waves. Our method preserves the dispersion properties of real waves, yet it supports interactions with obstacles and is computationally efficient. Fundamentally, it computes wave accelerations by way of applying a dispersion kernel as a spatially variant filter, which we are able to compute efficiently using two core technical contributions. First, we design novel, accurate, and compact pyramid kernels which compensate for low-frequency truncation errors. Second, we design a shadowed convolution operation that efficiently accounts for obstacle interactions by modulating the application of the dispersion kernel. We demonstrate a wide range of behaviors, which include capillary waves, gravity waves, and interactions with static and dynamic obstacles, all from within a single simulation.

We present a computational tool for fabrication-oriented design of flexible rod meshes. Given a deformable surface and a set of deformed poses as input, our method automatically computes a printable rod mesh that, once manufactured, closely matches the input poses under the same boundary conditions. The core of our method is formed by an optimization scheme that adjusts the cross-sectional profiles of the rods and their rest centerline in order to best approximate the target deformations. This approach allows us to locally control the bending and stretching resistance of the surface with a single material, yielding high design flexibility and low fabrication cost.