Adaptive Optical Layers: Efficient Tall Cell Grids for Liquid Simulation

Abstract Tall cell grids have been proposed as an efficient approach to accelerate large‐scale liquid simulation. In this framework, regions near the liquid surface are discretized with regular grids, while regions farther away are represented by elongated rectangular cells. The regular grid region close to the surface is referred to as the optical layer. In previous work, the thickness of this optical layer was uniformly fixed across the entire liquid domain. In this paper, we propose a novel tall cell grid structure in which the thickness of the optical layer is dynamically adjusted according to the motion of the liquid. This adaptive strategy reduces the number of grid cells required in the projection step without compromising visual quality, thereby accelerating the overall simulation. Furthermore, we introduce a two‐way coupling scheme between rigid bodies and liquids in regions where the optical layer remains thin. Our algorithm is simple and can be easily integrated into existing tall cell grid frameworks.