Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) is a 3D fluid simulation method that decomposes a volume of water into particles that can be used to simulate the behaviour of fluids such as water. Due to being formed by particles, SPH simulations don't have a surface. This project focuses on reconstructing the surface of SPH simulations by using Signed Distance Fields (SDFs).

SDFs calculate the distance to an object from a point in space. A positive value represents open space and a negative value represents the inside of an object. SDFs are rendered using raymarching: a technique that consists of marching a ray forward from a point in space until it intersects with an object. This project uses sphere tracing, an optimised version of raymarching due to having an adaptive step size when marching the ray forward into space.

The application tested rendering SDFs using sphere tracing and then using a 3D texture where the SDFs were pre-calculated to render the scene. To render the 3D texture in the scene a Ray-Box Intersection was used to figure out where in the world-space the contents of the texture should be rendered.










The full dissertation can be found at the bottom of this page.