Efficient animation of natural phenomena : details that adapt

A virtual world needs to be animated: in particular, it needs to be able to simulate natural phenomena effectively, while giving the user some control over the result. This lecture has presented a specific methodology, implemented for over fifteen years in my team, to tackle this issue. It involves breaking down the phenomenon into a series of independent sub-phenomena, coupled during animation, and each represented in the most appropriate way and scale. I have illustrated this methodology with an initial series of examples that were firsts in their time (lava flow, wind-blown meadow, virtual real-time ocean), as well as more recent work on coupling physical and geometric layers to simulate the crumpling of a sheet of paper in real time.