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.

@InProceedings\{ATO09,
  author       = "Alduán, Iván and Tena, Ángel and Otaduy, Miguel A.",
  title        = "Simulation of High-Resolution Granular Media",
  booktitle    = "Proc. of Congreso Español de Informática Gráfica",
  year         = "2009",
  url          = "http://gmrv.es/Publications/2009/ATO09"
}