Abstract Any sufficiently powerful explosion in air creates an expanding blast wave that propagates outwards from the source. The paper explores the physically based simulation of a blast wave impact on surrounding objects. The emphasis is on simplifying the underlying physical and chemical governing equations in order to achieve a visually believable result that performs in real time. A connected voxel model is used to represent objects, so that realistic solid debris is generated instead of flat polygons. The model permits arbitrary voxel shapes, which allow the creation of more complex objects with a lower number of voxels when compared to models using uniform voxel shapes. This model also overcomes certain limitations of the spring–mass particle model when it comes to representing rigid bodies. The paper also explores auxiliary visual effects caused by the blast wave, such as flame, smoke and dust. Each of these cues increases the visual plausibility of the explosion being simulated without being rigorously physically based or computationally intensive. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The paper presents a real-time physically based simulation of object damage and motion due to a blast wave impact. An improved connected voxel model is used to represent the objects. The paper also explores auxiliary visual effects caused by the blast wave that increase visual believability without being rigorously physically based or computationally expensive.

The production of computer-generated video presents a number of difficulties not encountered with motion pictures. Interlaced scanning and the color subcarrier of NTSC video are responsible for special problems such as interline flicker, and chroma aliasing. As in motion pictures, temporal aliasing is also an issue. A renderer can sample and filter a moving image in an arbitrary manner and is not constrained to simply imitate the behavior of a television camera. This paper explores several different spatiotemporal antialiasing filters and how they affect the quality of video animation.

BSP trees have been shown to provide an effective representation of polyhedra through the use of spatial subdivision, and are an alternative to the topologically based b-reps. While bsp tree algorithms are known for a number of important operations, such as rendering, no previous work on bsp trees has provided the capability of performing boolean set operations between two objects represented by bsp trees, i.e. there has been no closed boolean algebra when using bsp trees. This paper presents the algorithms required to perform such operations. In doing so, a distinction is made between the semantics of polyhedra and the more fundamental mechanism of spatial partitioning. Given a partitioning of a space, a particular semantics is induced on the space by associating attributes required by the desired semantics with the cells of the partitioning. So, for example, polyhedra are obtained simply by associating a boolean attribute with each cell. Set operations on polyhedra are then constructed on top of the operation of merging spatial partitionings. We present then the algorithm for merging two bsp trees independent of any attributes/semantics, and then follow this by the additional algorithmic considerations needed to provide set operations on polyhedra. The result is a simple and numerically robust algorithm for set operations.

A fast and simple voxel traversal algorithm through a 3D space partition is introduced. Going from one voxel to its neighbour requires only two floating point comparisons and one floating point addition. Also, multiple ray intersections with objects that are in more than one voxel are eliminated.

A new approach to ray tracing is introduced. The definition of a “ray” is extended into a cone by including information on the spread angle and the virtual origin. The advantages of this approach, which tries to model light propagation with more fidelity, include a better method of anti-aliasing, a way of calculating fuzzy shadows and dull reflections, a method of calculating the correct level of detail in a procedural model and texture map, and finally, a procedure for faster intersection calculation.