Real-Time Visual Animation of Explosions

Realistic explosion effects can enhance the realism and immersion in virtual battlefield. The real-time explosion effects simulation of the explosion products and their interactions, such as explosive fireball, explosive smoke and explosive ash, will be exploded into two phases: explosions and fuel modeling. The explosions modeling describe the formation and spreading of the explosive fireball. The fuel modeling depicts rising of the explosive ash accompanied by the explosive smoke. The paper describes an Eulerian approach for animating explosions in the first phase. The divergence-free velocity field is computed on a grid. In order to ensure the quality of conservation, the velocity divergence in the local is joined to describe smoke diffusion. The particles with the respective attributes are updated in both two phases. Simplified Navier-Stokes (NS) equations modified according to the non-conservation of explosion energy is used to determine the fluid motion in whole simulation process. In order to further improve the fidelity and real-time of the simulation effect, small-scale swirl effect of explosion smoke with vorticity confinement is introduced to compensate for the loss of finite difference methods to solve the NS equations. The whole simulation process of explosion effects are realized on Visual Studio 2010 and OpenGL platform, including multiple explosions, explosions near obstacles. The temperature and velocity in the explosion center, explosive diameter and height, are analyzed to verify the high fidelity of this new simulation method. The high fidelity and computational efficiency of this new modified approach are verified with several experimental simulation results.