Real-time smoke simulation based on vorticity preserving lattice Boltzmann method

It is crucial to achieve high efficiency and to preserve fine-grid details in 3D interactive smoke simulation. In this paper, we present a vorticity preserving lattice Boltzmann method (VPLBM) to simulate high-resolution motion of smoke in real time. We design the method based on lattice Boltzmann method (LBM), which is parallelism-friendly, to ensure the efficiency on parallel computing devices such as graphic processing units (GPUs). To resolve the vorticity dissipation issue in LBM, we further propose an LBM-based vorticity transport method which tracks the magnitude of vorticity during the simulation. We apply vorticity confinement according to the tracked vorticity, and therefore, our method can preserve the detailed motion of smoke. Our method is forward-iterative and contains three weakly dependent distribution functions: two for thermal LBM and one for vorticity tracking. Finally, we show an implementation of a parallel smoke simulator integrating VPLBM method on a dual-GPU platform. Using a fast ray marching method, the simulator shows realistic visual effect and achieves 157.3 frames per second on a 64×64×128\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$64 \times 64 \times 128$$\end{document} fine grid.