Controllable smoke animation with guiding objects

Abstract

This article addresses the problem of controlling the density and dynamics of smoke (a gas phenomenon) so that the synthetic appearance of the smoke (gas) resembles a still or moving object. Both the smoke region and the target object are represented as implicit functions. As a part of the target implicit function, a shape transformation is generated between an initial smoke region and the target object. In order to match the smoke surface with the target surface, we impose carefully designed velocity constraints on the smoke boundary during a dynamic fluid simulation. The velocity constraints are derived from an iterative functional minimization procedure for shape matching. The dynamics of the smoke is formulated using a novel compressible fluid model which can effectively absorb the discontinuities in the velocity field caused by imposed velocity constraints while reproducing realistic smoke appearances. As a result, a smoke region can evolve into a regular object and follow the motion of the object, while maintaining its smoke appearance. © 2005 ACM.