Animation of shape-controlled smoke flow

Abstract

We present a new method to produce smoke animations. By adding some forces, we efficiently controlled the smoke's target shape and kept smoke alive. Given an arbitrary object's shape represented by a geometric model, our method can generate an animation in which smoke flows out somewhere and quickly forms the shape. It looks like a cloud of moving smoke that fundamentally maintains the shape and fluid-like behavior. By adding two control forces to the physics-based free flow, the shape can be controlled well while smoke flowing. In our system, the free flow and the shape-controlled flow can be easily switched to each other. The additional computation to controlling the shape is negligible compared with the free flow.