Real-time cartoon animation of smoke: Natural Phenomena and Special Effects

In this paper, we present a practical framework to generate cartoon style animations of smoke, which consists of two components: a smoke simulator and a rendering system. In the simulation stage, the smoke is modelled as a set of smoothed particles and the physical parameters such as velocity and force are defined on particles directly. The smoke is rendered in flicker-free cartoon style with two-tone shading and silhouettes. Both the simulation and rendering are intuitive and easy to implement. In the most moderate scale scene, an impressive cartoon animation is generated with about a thousand particles at real-time frame rate. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.