Real Time Smoke and Fire using Triangle Meshes (SCA 2013 - Best Poster Winner)

We present a vorticity- and mesh-based fire and smoke simulation system which achieves real-time performance, two to three orders of magnitude faster than previously published mesh-based smoke results. We use a moderate number of vortex particles to drive a high resolution mesh. Topology changes are handled in real-time by remesh-ing each time-step using a robust tetrahedral-based isocontouring scheme. Emissive and absorptive qualities of the smoke and fire are rendered in view-order using shaders and linked-lists on the GPU. The physics and the mesh generation are computed on the CPU to obtain real-time frame-rates (30 FPS).