It’s been a long time since I was at CGS, but I hope there will be some support. It concerns the following topic:
For an extinction training simulation I have to find ways to virtually burn objects in a video sequence. The idea is to create virtual fire and smoke and “overlay” it with the video. Edge detection will be used later to define areas where fire is and where not.
Video is controlled by LabVIEW (National Instruments). Fire and Smoke has therefore to be totally controllable by LabVIEW too. For this reason the best deal is to have fire and smoke that is formed or built parametrically (speed, orientation, dead, size, …).
Primary goal is to have burning that looks at least realistic as real burning. And it has to be in realtime!
My task atm is to find different solutions and technical approaches and compare them. I’ve read a lot about computer generated fire and smoke and these are the keywords that came up:
[ul]
[li]Navier Stoke equations[/li][li]flame shaders[/li][li]Lagrange vs. Euler[/li][li]Procedural shaders[/li][li]Volumetric Fire[/li][li]grid based (solvers?)[/li][li]voxel[/li][li]particle systems[/li][li]also point sprites (they used it in Lord of the rings I guess, it looks awesome)[/li][li]DirectX, High Level Shader Languange, ATI’s Adv. Shader Language Interface, Renderman[/li][/ul]Well, these are just terms that spook in my head, so they are not sorted. I gonna build three groups of different attempts:
[ul]
[li]Physical based solutions with its solvers. Fluid dynamics[/li][li]Procedural based solutions using noise or fractals[/li][li]3D or 2D Particle systems[/li]li[/li][/ul]I tend to use DirectX for implementation. I know that most shaders are written in Renderman, but they can converted into other languages. I’m not sure if physical based solvers work in realtime, but results look awesome (stills from Fedkiw or Musgrave, Ebert, etc.).
Well, to cut a long story short, do you have any ideas that are quite simple (calculation or programming) and are fast (realtime application). Don’t forget the total controlability.
Thanks guys for helping me.
