Efficient smoke simulation on curvilinear grids

Abstract

This thesis present an efficient approach for performing smoke simulation on curvilinear grids. The solution of the Navier-Stokes equations on curvilinear is made on three steps: advection, pressure solving and velocity projection. The proposed advection method is simple, fast and unconditionally-stable. Our solution is able to maintain a staggered-grid variable arrangement, and includes an efficient solution to enforce mass conservation. Compared to approaches based on regular grids traditionally used in computer graphics, our method allows for better representation of boundary conditions, lending to more realistic results, with just a small increment in computational cost. Moreover, we are able to condensate cells where interesting artifacts tend to appear, like swirling vortices or turbulence. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, both in 2-D and 3-D, through a variety of high-quality smoke simulations and animations. These examples show the integration of our method with overlapping grids and multigrid techniques.