Non-Photorealistic Computer Graphics Library

A Real-Time, Controllable Simulator for Plausible Smoke

Author(s): Morgan McGuire.
Technical Report: Brown University, March, 2006.
[BibTeX]

Abstract:
While many games and other virtual world applications include real-time simulation of rigid bodies, fluids and gasses have proven harder to animate efficiently. This report describes a method for extending previous work with particle systems to efficiently simulate smoke that interacts with rigid bodies, using an existing rigid body simulator. The method is applicable compressible fluids and gasses other than smoke. Although the animations produced by this method are not physically correct, they exhibit the phenomenology of real smoke, including dissipation, vortices, and compression. The animations can also be controlled through aesthetically meaningful parameters like drag and vortex axis. Thus the simulator is wellsuited to applications where interactive performance and expressive power are preferred to realism; for example, video games and rapid development of animation.