Animating real-time explosions

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.