A simple, Efficient method for real-time simulation of smoke shadow

Abstract

This paper proposes a simple, efficient method for real-time smoke shadow simulation. In this method, 3D density fields of smoke are directly projected and accumulated into a shadow buffer. Diffusion scheme is creatively taken from fluids dynamics to "soft" shadow texture. These two steps are called Direct-Projection-Diffusion (DPD) which is computationally inexpensive in comparison with traditional methods for participating media volume rendering. For shadow interaction, projective texturing based on the programmable graphics hardware is used to project the shadow texture onto any object's surface in the scene. The test result shows that our method is efficient and is feasible to solve the problem of real-time smoke shadow simulation in 3D computer games and in 3D animation initial production. Keywords: Smoke Shadow Simulation, Diffusion, Shadow Texture, GPU, Projective Texturing. © 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin/Heidelberg.