Interactive Wood Combustion for Botanical Tree Models

Sören Pirk, Michał Jarząbek, Torsten Hädrich, Dominik L. Michels, Wojciech Palubicki

We present a novel method for the combustion of botanical tree models. Tree models are represented as connected particles for the branching structure and a polygonal surface mesh for the combustion. Each particle stores biological and physical attributes that drive the kinetic behavior of a plant and the exothermic reaction of the combustion. Coupled with realistic physics for rods, the particles enable dynamic branch motions. We model material properties, such as moisture and charring behavior, and associate them with individual particles. The combustion is efficiently processed in the surface domain of the tree model on a polygonal mesh. A user can dynamically interact with the model by initiating fires and by inducing stress on branches. The flames realistically propagate through the tree model by consuming the available resources. Our method runs at interactive rates and supports multiple tree instances in parallel. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through numerous examples and evaluate its plausibility against the combustion of real wood samples.

Interactive Wood Combustion for Botanical Tree Models

LazyFluids: Appearance Transfer for Fluid Animations

Ondrej Jamriska, Jakub Fiser, Paul Asente, Jingwan Lu, Eli Shechtman, Daniel Sykora

In this paper we present a novel approach to appearance transfer for fluid animations based on flow-guided texture synthesis. In contrast to common practice where pre-captured sets of fluid elements are combined in order to achieve desired motion and look, we bring the possibility of fine-tuning motion properties in advance using CG techniques, and then transferring the desired look from a selected appearance exemplar. We demonstrate that such a practical workflow cannot be simply implemented using current state-of-the-art techniques, analyze what the main obstacles are, and propose a solution to resolve them. In addition, we extend the algorithm to allow for synthesis with rich boundary effects and video exemplars. Finally, we present numerous results that demonstrate the versatility of the proposed approach.

LazyFluids: Appearance Transfer for Fluid Animations

Fluid Volume Modeling from Sparse Multi-view Images by Appearance Transfer

Makoto Okabe, Yoshinori Dobashi, Ken Anjyo, Rikio Onai

We propose a method of three-dimensional (3D) modeling of volumetric fluid phenomena from sparse multi-view images (e.g., only a single-view input or a pair of front- and side-view inputs). The volume determined from such sparse inputs using previous methods appears blurry and unnatural with novel views; however, our method preserves the appearance of novel viewing angles by transferring the appearance information from input images to novel viewing angles. For appearance information, we use histograms of image intensities and steerable coefficients. We formulate the volume modeling as an energy minimization problem with statistical hard constraints, which is solved using an expectation maximization (EM)-like iterative algorithm. Our algorithm begins with a rough estimate of the initial volume modeled from the input images, followed by an iterative process whereby we first render the images of the current volume with novel viewing angles. Then, we modify the rendered images by transferring the appearance information from the input images, and we thereafter model the improved volume based on the modified images. We iterate these operations until the volume converges. We demonstrate our method successfully provides natural-looking volume sequences of fluids (i.e., fire, smoke, explosions, and a water splash) from sparse multi-view videos. To create production-ready fluid animations, we further propose a method of rendering and editing fluids using a commercially available fluid simulator.
Fluid Volume Modeling from Sparse Multi-view Images by Appearance Transfer

The Affine Particle-In-Cell Method

Chenfanfu Jiang, Craig Schroeder, Andrew Selle, Joseph Teran, Alexey Stomakhin

Hybrid Lagrangian/Eulerian simulation is commonplace in computer graphics for fluids and other materials undergoing large deformation. In these methods, particles are used to resolve transport and topological change, while a background Eulerian grid is used for computing mechanical forces and collision responses. Particle- in-Cell (PIC) techniques, particularly the Fluid Implicit Particle (FLIP) variants have become the norm in computer graphics calculations. While these approaches have proven very powerful, they do suffer from some well known limitations. The original PIC is stable, but highly dissipative, while FLIP, designed to remove this dissipation, is more noisy and at times, unstable. We present a novel technique designed to retain the stability of the original PIC, with- out suffering from the noise and instability of FLIP. Our primary observation is that the dissipation in the original PIC results from a loss of information when transferring between grid and particle representations. We prevent this loss of information by augmenting each particle with a locally affine, rather than locally constant, description of the velocity. We show that this not only stably removes the dissipation of PIC, but that it also allows for exact conservation of angular momentum across the transfers between particles and grid.

The Affine Particle-In-Cell Method

Baroclinic Turbulence with Varying Density and Temperature

Doyub Kim, Seung Woo Lee, Oh-young Song, Hyeong-Seok Ko

The explosive or volcanic scenes in motion pictures involve complex turbulent flow as its temperature and density vary in space. To simulate this turbulent flow of an inhomogeneous fluid, we propose a simple and efficient framework. Instead of explicitly computing the complex motion of this fluid dynamical instability, we first approximate the average motion of the fluid. Then, the high-resolution dynamics is computed using our new extended version of the vortex particle method with baroclinity. This baroclinity term makes turbulent effects by generating new vortex particles according to temperature/density distributions. Using our method, we efficiently simulated a complex scene with varying density and temperature.

Baroclinic Turbulence with Varying Density and Temperature

Procedural Fluid Modeling of Explosion Phenomena Based on Physical Properties

Genichi Kawada, Takashi Kanai

We propose a method to procedurally model the fluid flows of explosion phenomena by taking physical properties into account. Explosion flows are always quite difficult to control, because they easily disturb each other and change rapidly. With this method, the target flows are described by control paths, and the propagation flows are controlled by following these paths. We consider the physical properties, which are the propagations of the pressure generated by the ignition, the detonation state caused by the pressure and the fuel combustions. Velocity, density, temperature and pressure fields are generated procedurally, and the fluid flows are computed from these four fields based on grid-based fluid simulations. Using this method, we can achieve a fluid motion that closely resembles one generated solely through simulation. This method realizes the modeling of flows controlled frame by frame and follows the flow’s physical properties.

Procedural Fluid Modeling of Explosion Phenomena Based on Physical Properties

Graph-based Fire Synthesis

Yubo Zhang, Carlos Correa, Kwan-Liu Ma

We present a novel graph-based data-driven technique for cost-effective fire modeling. This technique allows composing long animation sequences using a small number of short simulations. While traditional techniques such as motion graphs and motion blending work well for character motion synthesis, they cannot be trivially applied to fluids to produce results with physically consistent properties which are crucial to the visual appearance of fluids. Motivated by the motion graph technique used in character animations, we introduce a new type of graph which can be applied to create various fire phenomena. Each graph node consists of a group of compact spatialtemporal flow pathlines instead of a set of volumetric state fields. Consequently, achieving smooth transitions between discontinuous graph nodes for modeling turbulent fires becomes feasible and computationally efficient.The synthesized particle flow results allow direct particle controls which is much more flexible than a full volumetric representation of the simulation output. The accompanying video shows the versatility and potential power of this new technique for synthesizing realtime complex fire at the quality comparable to production animations.

Graph-based Fire Synthesis

Animation of Chemically Reactive Fluids using a Hybrid Simulation Method

Chemical phenomena abound in the real world, and often comprise indispensable elements of visual effects that are routinely created in the film industry. In this paper, we present a hybrid technique for simulating chemically reactive fluids, based on the theory of chemical kinetics. Our method makes synergistic use of both Eulerian grid-based methods and Lagrangian particle methods to simulate real and hypothetical chemical mechanisms effectively and efficiently. We demonstrate that by modeling chemical reactions using a particle system, an established, physically based fluid system can be extended easily to generate a wide range of chemical phenomena, ranging from catalysis and erosion to fire and explosions, with only a small additional cost.

Animation of Chemically Reactive Fluids Using a Hybrid Simulation Method

Wrinkled Flames and Cellular Patterns

“We model flames and fire using the Navier-Stokes equations combined with the level set method and jump conditions to model the reaction front. Previous works modeled the flame using a combination of propagation in the normal direction and a curvature term which leads to a level set equation that is parabolic in nature and thus overly dissipative and smooth. Asymptotic theory shows that one can obtain more interesting velocities and fully hyperbolic (as opposed to parabolic) equations for the level set evolution. In particular, researchers in the field of detonation shock dynamics (DSD)
have derived a set of equations which exhibit characteristic cellular patterns. We show how to make use of the DSD framework in the context of computer graphics simulations of flames and fire to obtain interesting features such as flame wrinkling and cellular patterns.”

Wrinkled Flames and Cellular Patterns