Combining mechanical properties of solids and fluids, granular materials pose important challenges for the design of algorithms for realistic animation. In this paper, we present a simulation algorithm based on smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) that succeeds in modeling important features of the behavior of granular materials. These features are unilateral incompressibility, friction and cohesion. We extend an existing unilateral incompressibility formulation to be added at almost no effort to an existing SPH-based algorithm for fluids. The main advantages of this extension are the ease of implementation, the lack of grid artifacts, and the simple two-way coupling with other objects. Our friction and cohesion models can also be incorporated in a seamless manner in the overall SPH simulation algorithm

Granular materials enjoy vivid motion phenomena that make them highly visually attractive. However, simulating each and every physical grain imposes an extremely high computational cost, due to the stringent resolution requirements. In this paper, we introduce a method for simulating granular media that achieves high visual resolution and high mechanical fidelity at a lower computational cost than earlier methods. Our method is based on a novel spatial decomposition of the computation of internal and external forces. The method is also highly parallelizable and configurable, allowing the artist to simulate a large range of granular materials.