A Compression Scheme for Volumetric animations of Running water

Fluid animations are becoming a standard tool for computer animators. Simulation of turbulent gases, running water, eroded surfaces, or splashing waves are common, but still demanding because they are usually calculated in a voxel space. This brings new requirements to the tools that are used for such animations. The data structures are enormous but providing a good space and time coherency. We present a compression scheme that can be used for storing, accessing, and viewing such animations interactively. Key-frames are compressed by the RLE algorithm and in-betweens as difference frames. To display the scene we convert the level of water and the terrain surface to triangle meshes by the marching cubes algorithm. With this lossless technique we reach compression factor up to 1:100. Scenes can be decompressed fast, can be displayed, and manipulated interactively.