One embodiment of the present invention sets forth multigrid generation technique which enables accurate simulations of large scale three dimensional (3D) fluid volumes. A model of the fluid to be simulated is represented using a cell grid. The generated multigrid provides a hierarchy of increasingly coarser representations of the model that are used by a pressure solver. Eulerian simulation techniques require solving a linear system to determine pressure values for each cell within the cell grid. Different levels of the multigrid are then used to compute the pressure values for different regions of the model, maintaining accuracy near the surface of the fluid while simplifying the computations. The accurate pressure values ensure that the simulation produces detailed features of the water movement. Additionally, the multigrid pressure solver may be optimized for execution by a graphics processor.