Realistic Smoke Simulation Using A Frustum Aligned Grid

Realistic simulation of smoke is used in the special effects industry to produce smoke in both feature films and video games. Traditional simulations utilize uniformly spaced rectangular computational grids to perform the smoke simulation. Various changes had been proposed to improve different aspects of the simulation, including level of details, memory usage and simulation speed. In this thesis, I propose a novel computational grid that improves upon the level of details as well as memory usage. I propose a frustum aligned grid that takes advantage of the viewing camera because details are most important in the area close to the camera. A frustum aligned grid reduces the amount of grid points necessary to cover the whole domain by placing a high concentration of grid points near the camera while having sparse grid points away from the camera. By using a larger number of grid lines in the direction parallel to the camera and fewer grid lines in the direction perpendicular to the camera, high level of details using a smaller amount of memory can be achieved. The grid is logically rectangular and a perspective transformation can map the grid into a spatially rectangular one. These properties enable the use of existing simulation tools with some modifications, thus maintaining the level of speed. Experimental results and comparison with a standard uniform grid demonstrate the practicality and effectiveness of the proposed method.