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This article is a little different from the fare you’re used to getting from me: it’s for SIAM News, which is the magazine for members of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). The audience for this magazine, in other words, is professional mathematicians and related researchers working in a wide variety of fields. While the article contains equations, I wrote it to be understandable even if you skip over the math.
The Serious Mathematics of Digital Animation
For SIAM News:
While computer simulations have a wide range of uses, their goals are generally similar: find the simplest model that recreates the properties of the system under investigation. For scientific systems, this involves matching observed or experimental phenomena as precisely as necessary.
But what about movie simulations? Should they match the processes they replicate so closely? Computer-generated imagery (CGI) is a common feature in both animated and live-action films. For these CGI systems, creating visuals that look right is an important task. However, Joseph Teran of the University of California, Los Angeles believes that starting from physical models is still a good idea.
During his invited address at the 2018 SIAM Annual Meeting, held in Portland, Ore., this July, Teran pointed out that beginning with a mathematical system is often easier than drawing from real life. Many movies model a system’s various forces and internal structures with partial differential equations (PDEs) for this reason. While solving these equations to produce CGI is computationally expensive, such methods have become powerful tools for creating realistic visual cinematic effects.
