Self-adaptive Algorithm for Simulating Sand Painting in Real-Time

Sand painting is a form of combination of arts and modern aesthetic, which relies on profound cultural heritage and cultural connotation. To provide the public and artists with an opportunity to better understand sand painting and make art creations surprisingly, this paper proposes a self-adaptive algorithm to simulate sand painting in a real-time way. Our simulation system exploits the height field to simulate sand flow to achieve a fast even real-time target. Seven frequently-used styles of painting techniques are elaborately defined and successfully simulated in our system, including pouring, seeping, dotting, stroking, sweeping, multi-stroking, and pinching. The procedure of sand flow is mainly consist of two key parts: sand accumulation and collapse. The direction field is introduced into the system to control a similar appearance of a normal distribution, which will be of benefit to sand accumulation algorithm. A selfadaptive approach is taken advantage of into sand collapse algorithm to present certain appearances with various details. A color factor is also considered for realistic simulation in this paper in two ways: one is the background color of sand table/canvas and the other is the natural color of sand particles themselves. User feedbacks and experimental results reveal that the algorithm of sand painting simulation in this paper can realize kinds of sand painting arts of creations easily, realistically, effectively and interactively.