Turbulent Wind Fields for Gaseous Phenomena

Jos Stam, Eugene Fiume

SIGGRAPH Annual Conference Series
1993

Abstract

The realistic depiction of smoke, steam, mist and water reacting to a turbulent field such as wind is an attractive and challenging problem. Its solution requires interlocking models for turbulent fields, gaseous flow, and realistic illumination. We present a model for turbulent wind flow having a deterministic component to specify large-scale behaviour, and a stochastic component to model turbulent small-scale behaviour. The small-scale component is generated using space-time Fourier synthesis. Turbulent wind fields can be superposed interactively to create subtle behaviour. An advection-diffusion model is used to animate particle-based gaseous phenomena embedded in a wind field, and we derive an efficient physically-cased illumination model for rendering the system. Because the number of particles can be quite large, we present a clustering algorithm for efficient animation and rendering.