Abstract

In this paper we present a new method for efficiently controlling animated smoke. Given a sequence of target smoke states, our method generates a smoke simulation in which the smoke is driven towards each of these targets in turn, while exhibiting natural-looking interesting smoke-like behavior. This control is made possible by two new terms that we add to the standard flow equations: (i) a driving force term that causes the fluid to carry the smoke towards a particular target, and (ii) a smoke gathering term that prevents the smoke from diffusing too much. These terms are explicitly defined by the instantaneous state of the system at each simulation timestep. Thus, no expensive optimization is required, allowing complex smoke animations to be generated with very little additional cost compared to ordinary flow simulations.

Click here for a preprint of the full ACM SIGGRAPH 2004 paper (Adobe PDF, 598KB)

Movie Clips

Description	Clip
Figure 2, rows A and B: this sequence demonstrates the effect of the smoke gathering term:
Figure 2, rows B and C: and this sequence compares a second order hyperbolic solver with dissipative first order upwinding:
Figure 4: A smoke animation of the SIGGRAPH 2004 logo.
Figure 5: The Stanford bunny is formed by smoke emitted from two sources.
Figure 6: A walking mouse; A leaping tiger.
Figure 7: Yin-Yang: control of two smoke fields sharing the same medium fluid.
Figure 8: A smoke gallleon sailing through a smoke ring.
Bonus feature 1: A side-by-side comparison demonstrating the effect of some of the control parameters discussed in Section 3.4.
Bonus feature 2: The driving force coefficient is used to control the progress of the simulation towards the target.
Bonus feature 3: A uniform smoke field is driven towards a complex target.

Target-Driven Smoke Animation

Movie Clips