A completely parallel surface reconstruction method for particle-based fluids

We present a novel surface reconstruction pipeline that significantly improves reconstructing efficiency while preserves high-quality details for particle-based liquid simulation. Our surface reconstruction algorithm is a sort of completely parallel narrow band method. At the beginning of reconstruction, we develop a spatial hashing grid-based strategy to identify surface particles, which is much more precise and simpler than the smoothed color field. Consequently, those precise surface particles ensure accurate extraction of scalar field in the narrow band around surface without any redundancy, which brings great performance improvement for subsequent reconstruction stages. Furthermore, in order to obtain a better computation performance, we carefully analyze the potential race conditions and conditional branches of each reconstruction step between parallel threads and come up with a completely parallel reconstruction method combined with the exclusive prefix sum algorithm. Our method is pretty straightforward to implement. Experimental results demonstrate that our method runs up to dozen times faster than the state-of-the-art of narrow band-based fluid surface reconstruction, especially for large-scale particle-based fluid.