“Bending fire with Plume, a CUDA-Based 3D Fluid Solver” by Maury, Piponi, Andorra and Hammack
Conference:
Type(s):
Title:
- Bending fire with Plume, a CUDA-Based 3D Fluid Solver
Session/Category Title: Elemental Training 101
Presenter(s)/Author(s):
Abstract:
Central to the animated series ”Avatar: The Last Airbender” are characters called ”benders” who control the elements. For the movie adaptation, Industrial Light & Magic was tasked with translating the element bending effects into live action. The challenge of developing a methodology for fire bending is that it epitomizes the conflict between the needs for both creative freedom and realism. In one of our recent shows, we had already demonstrated that we could reliably leverage the power of GPUs for both simulation and final rendering in production. However, the frustum-based solution developed for that show was inappropriate for the camera motion, the fire dynamics and rendering requirements of the new show. In response, we developed Plume, a more general purpose GPU-based 3d fluid solver integrated with a volume renderer. Although originally developed for fire bending, Plume was also used throughout the show for air bending dynamics as well as the simulation and rendering of dust, smoke and mist.
References:
FEDKIW, R., STAM, J., AND JENSEN, H. W. 2001. Visual simulation of smoke. In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2001, ACM Press / ACM SIGGRAPH, E. Fiume, Ed., Computer Graphics Proceedings, Annual Conference Series, ACM, 15–22.
HORVATH, C., AND GEIGER, W. 2009. Directable, high-resolution simulation of fire on the gpu. ACM Transactions on Graphics 28, 3 (July), 41:1–41:8.
MOLEMAKER, J., COHEN, J. M., PATEL, S., AND NOH, J. 2008. Low viscosity flow simulations for animation. In 2008 ACM SIGGRAPH / Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation, 9–18.
