Stylized Smoke Rendering

We describe a technique for generating cartoon style animations of smoke. Our method takes the output of a physically-based simulator and uses it to drive particles that are rendered using a variant of the depth differences technique (originally used for rendering trees). Specific issues we address include the placement and evolution of primitives in the flow and the maintenance of temporal coherence. The results are visually simple, flicker-free animations that convey the turbulent, dynamic nature of the gas with simple outlines.

Andrew Selle, Alex Mohr and Stephen Chenney, Cartoon Rendering of Smoke Animations, Proceedings of NPAR 2004 (Non-Photorealistic Animation and Rendering), 2004.

Video (MPEG4 for Windows).
Video (Quicktime).

Questions/Comments: Stephen Chenney