Fast Vortex Particle Method for Fluid-Character Interaction.

High fidelity interactions between game characters and gaseous effects like smoke, fire and explosions are often neglected in real-time applications due to the high computational cost of simulating fluids. In addition, the pose of game characters is only known at runtime as it depends on input from the user. Thus simulation-suitable representations of surface geometry must be generated on the fly. Common approaches like conversion into signed distance fields are not feasible for high-resolution geometry due to the computational cost and the amount of memory required on the GPU to store these fields. We present a purely vortex particle based fluid model for games which is capable of resolving the collision between fluids and complex objects such as moving game characters in real time. To handle collisions, we use a collocation method which only require a set of disassociated particles stuck to collision surfaces. Contrary to most other vorticity based methods, we use a simple inversion free approach to obtain the collision velocity field on surfaces while at the same time avoiding the expensive pressure projection step associated with pressure based fluid solvers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]