Digital Artwork Creation Using Water and Sand on a Two-Dimensional Surface

In this paper, we developed a system which enables users to draw pictures of sand and water on a two-dimensional surface in a virtual environment. By mixing water and sand for artwork creation, we can create different styles of pictures. Our system has three major subsystems: water animation system, sand animation system and rendering system. In the simulation part, we compute the motion of sand and water based on the interactions for water-water, sand-water and sand-sand. In the rendering part, we attempt to balance the rendering quality and the computation cost. We render water using a ray tracing method and the sand is rendered with shadow. Thus, the rendered results of water and sand look like 2.5D. We tested our system and the experimental results showed that the users could create a variety of pictures of sand and water.