Vorticity confinement reintroduces the small scale detail lost when using efficient semi-Lagrangian schemes for simulating smoke and fire. However, it only amplifies the existing vorticity, and thus can be insufficient for highly turbulent effects such as explosions or rough water. We introduce a new hybrid technique that makes synergistic use of Lagrangian vortex particle methods and Eulerian grid based methods to overcome the weaknesses of both. Our approach uses vorticity confinement itself to couple these two methods together. We demonstrate that this approach can generate highly turbulent effects unachievable by standard grid based methods, and show applications to smoke, water and explosion simulations.

In this paper, we present an efficient method for simulating highly detailed large scale participating media such as the nuclear explosions shown in figure 1. We capture this phenomena by simulating the motion of particles in a fluid dynamics generated velocity field. A novel aspect of this paper is the creation of highly detailed three-dimensional turbulent velocity fields at interactive rates using a low to moderate amount of memory. The key idea is the combination of two-dimensional high resolution physically based flow fields with a moderate sized three-dimensional Kolmogorov velocity field tiled periodically in space.