Real-time smoke simulation with improved turbulence by spatial adaptive vorticity confinement

Turbulence modeling has recently drawn many attentions in fluid animation to generate small-scale rolling features. Being one of the widely adopted approaches, vorticity confinement method re-injects lost energy dissipation back to the flow. However, previous works suffer from deficiency when large vorticity coefficient e is used, due to the fact that constant e is applied all over the simulated domain. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to enhance the visual effect by employing an adaptive vorticity confinement which varies the strength with respect to the helicity instead of a user-defined constant. To further improve fine details in turbulent flows, we are not only applying our proposed vorticity confinement to lowresolution grid, but also on a finer grid to generate sub-grid level turbulence. Since the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations are solved only in low-resolution grid, this saves a significant amount of computation. Several experiments demonstrate that our method can produce realistic smoke animation with enhanced turbulence effects in real-time. Copyright # 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.