Implicit modeling to visualize the sintering of particles

The representation of objects through fields is an idea that has shown to be extremely impactful on computer-aided design. That idea can have a lot more impact when it is brought into animation. When implicit modeling is used for animation, it can be a great tool to visualize common physical processes. One of those common physical processes is the sintering of particles in powder bed fusion processes. Each particle can be described as a circular field, and the sintering of a particle is described by increasing the size of its field.

In the case of laser sintering, the laser, the source energy is sintering the different particles. This is equivalent to increasing the size of the particles' fields around the laser's path.

To help visualize the process, I restricted myself to cross-sectional fusion. Below are two small animations for straight and curved laser trajectories. The red dot indicates the laser location. No heat equations or models were used here; this was just for visualization purposes.