Animating explosion with exploding sound and rigid-body sound

Visual simulation of explosion animation can be found many applications in virtual reality. In addition to visual simulation, sound synthesis of explosion scenes is also indispensable. However, little attention has been paid to this research area. To this end, this paper proposes an automatic sound synthesis method for explosion scenes. Explosion animation consists of two major events, namely explosive event and interactive rigid-body fracture event. Correspondingly, the sound for an explosion scene can be viewed as the combination of two components, that is, the exploding sound and the rigid-body sound. Among them, the exploding sound often shows similarity in terms of characteristics in frequency domain, while the rigid-body sound is rich in variations due to the unpredictable motion state and different materials of debris. As a result, for the synthesis of the rigid-body sound, firstly, we extract the rigid-body sounds from recording examples by the empirical mode decomposition method. On this basis, a new spectral flux based approach is developed to segment the extracted sounds into a grain dictionary. Then, a cascade sound synthesis method based on impulse response is designed to synchronize the rigid-body sound for fracture events. For the synthesis of exploding sound, due to its similar characteristics in frequency domain, an example-based automatic sound synthesis method is adapted in this paper. Finally, we propose a priority-aware sound blending method to merge these two types of completely different sounds reasonably. Various experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of our new method.