Examples of smoke simulations produced with our technique. (left) 2-D simulation on a channel with multiple obstacles. (right) 3-D smoke simulation in a wind tunnel to visually evaluate a car’s aerodynamics properties.

Efficient Smoke Simulation on Curvilinear Grids

Vinicius C. Azevedo vcazevedo@inf.ufrgs.br

and

Manuel M. Oliveira oliveira@inf.ufrgs.br

Instituto de Informática, UFRGS

Computer Graphics Forum.
Volume 32 (2013), Number 7, pp. 235-244. [DOI]
Best Student Paper Award at Pacific Graphics 2013

Contents

We present an efficient approach for performing smoke simulation on curvilinear grids. Our technique is based on a fast unconditionally-stable advection algorithm and on a new and efficient solution to enforce mass conservation. It uses a staggered-grid variable arrangement, and has linear cost on the number of grid cells. Our method naturally integrates itself with overlapping-grid techniques, lending to an efficient way of producing highly-realistic animations of dynamic scenes. Compared to approaches based on regular grids traditionally used in computer graphics, our method allows for better representation of boundary conditions, with just a small increment in computational cost. Thus, it can be used to evaluate aerodynamic properties, possibly enabling unexplored applications in computer graphics, such as interactive computation of lifting forces on complex objects. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, both in 2-D and 3-D, through a variety of high-quality smoke animations.

Paper

Full Paper (pre-print)


Suplementary Material (122 kB, 2 pages)

The final publication is available at the Computer Graphics Forum Journal

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Video

Citation

Vinicius C. Azevedo and Manuel M. Oliveira. "Efficient Smoke Simulation on Curvilinear Grids". Computer Graphics Forum. Volume 32 (2013), Number 7, pp. 235-244.

BibTeX

  @article{AzevedoOliveira2013CurvGrids,
  author  = {Vinicius C. Azevedo and Manuel M. Oliveira},
  title   = {Efficient Smoke Simulation on Curvilinear Grids},
  journal = {Computer Graphics Forum},
  volume  = {32},
  number  = {7},
  month   = {October},
  year    = {2013},
  pages   = {235-244},
  doi     = {10.1111/cgf.12231}
}
  

Keywords

Smoke Simulation, Curvillienar Grids, Fluid Animation, CFD, Semi-Lagrangian Method, Computer Graphics.

This work was sponsored by CNPq (fellowships # 131655/2010-8, 482271/2012-4, and 308936/2010-8) and CAPES.