Our work concerns the combination of an Eulerian liquid simulation with a
high-resolution surface tracker (e.g. the level set method or a Lagrangian
triangle mesh). The naive application of a high-resolution surface tracker to a
low-resolution velocity field can produce many visually disturbing physical and
topological artifacts that limit their use in practice. We address these
problems by defining an error function which compares the current state of the
surface tracker to the set of physically valid surface states. By reducing this
error with a gradient descent technique, we introduce a novel physics-based
surface fairing method. Similarly, by treating this error function as a
potential energy, we derive a new surface correction force that mimics the
vortex sheet equations. We demonstrate our results with both level set and
mesh-based surface trackers.