Hybrid vortex model for efficiently simulating turbulent smoke

Simulating fluids based on vortex methods can produce attractive visual effects for movies, games and virtual reality systems. However, for any vortex method, such as vortex filament, vortex sheet and vortex particle, it is still a challenging task to efficiently and stably simulate the high-quality smoke, as the motion of each fluid element is influenced by all the vortex elements in the simulation domain and different method has its certain advantages or limitations. In this paper, we introduce the vortex filaments in grids scheme, in which the uniform grids dynamically bridge the vortex filaments and smoke particles for efficient smoke simulation with fine visual effects. We present the novel hybrid vortex model that employs Vortex-in-Cell for efficient smoke simulation with turbulent visual effects. Our model can sensibly estimate the turbulence status of fluid and base on that to utilize the hybrid model that describes the vortex motion for more efficiency. We further break down the overly stretched filaments into vortex particles, with which we obtain the stable smoke simulation with diffusion of vorticity. Our experimental results have showed that the hybrid vortex model are enabled to produce the visual plausibility with effective and stable performance.