A Real-Time, Controllable Simulator for Plausible Smoke

Morgan McGuire 2006
view paper: http://graphics.cs.brown.edu/games/CartoonSmoke/mcguire-simulation-2006.pdf

Overview
Morgan uses a particle system approach to generate the smoke effect. At the same time, spherical vortices are dynamically created to affect the behaviour of the particles. Each vortex applies centripital acceleration and centrifugal or “suction” acceleration perpendicular to the vortex rotation and radial direction. Morgan also took into account of other external forces such as wind, gravity and drag that affect the particles' movement pattern. The simulator ignored the collision between particles so as to achieve faster calculation and real-time results.

As stated in the paper, the copying of particle data from CPU to GPU is slow. The simulation is non-realistic but that can be further improved. It is also difficult for artists to control the shape and movement of the smoke by defining the forces. The model does not fully use the rules of fluid dynamics and may have same visual defects. But in order to achieve fast calculation and real-time generation, some trade-off of the visual aspect can be justified.

Using vortices to affect the behaviour of the smoke can be useful in my project in order to achieve realistic and random effects. At the same time, some level of control over the particles within the vortices can be achieved.