Ryan Goldade is the recipient of the 2021 Alain Fournier Award for Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation in Computer Graphics. Dr. Goldade’s dissertation, titled, Efficient Liquid Animation: New Discretizations for Spatially Adaptive Liquid Viscosity and Reduced-Model Two-Phase Bubbles and Inviscid Liquids, made outstanding contributions to the field of computer graphics.
Dr. Goldade’s research focused on improving the computational efficiency of simulating viscous liquids and air bubbles immersed in liquids. He devised a novel domain discretization method to focus computational effort near the fluid surface in order to more efficiently capture intricate details of viscous liquids. He also proposed a novel approach to simulating bubbles within liquids as constraints on surrounding liquid, which was able to achieve realistic bubble animations with no significant additional computational cost to a standard liquid simulator. These primary contributions are supported by a large number of additional contributions and practical considerations, including model reduction approaches, a volume tracking method, a convenient tile-based adaptivity model, and a tailored multigrid solver.
Dr. Goldade’s dissertation comprises three top-tier publications, two in ACM Transactions on Graphics and one in Eurographics. His proposed techniques for fluid simulation have already been adopted by the visual effects industry. The committee felt that Dr. Goldade wrote a coherent, comprehensive, and complete dissertation, which is a notable accomplishment for a manuscript-style dissertation. The three publications are synthesized and presented in a compelling way to demonstrate an overarching contribution of work that is greater than the contribution of each individual publication. The dissertation introduces mathematical concepts in a rigorous, but accessible way, supported by clear figures and diagrams that add substantial clarity to the exposition. The dissertation includes an excellent background chapter and a comprehensive review of related work. Dr. Goldade’s dissertation represents an outstanding achievement in the area of fluid simulation and is well deserving of the 2021 Alain Fournier Award.
Dr. Goldade obtained his Bachelor and Master of Applied Science in Engineering Science at Simon Fraser University in 2009 and 2014, respectively. He graduated in 2021 with his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo under the supervision of Prof. Christopher Batty. He obtained Graduate Excellence Awards and a President’s Graduate Scholarship from the University of Waterloo, as well as a Queen Elizabeth II Graduate Scholarship. During most of his PhD studies, he worked part-time at SideFX on various fluid implementations.