Interactive flowing of highly viscous volumes in virtual environments

We present a simple and linear 3D cellular automata approach for animating the behaviors of viscous flow volumes in virtual environments. An accurate modeling of fluid flow usually requires complicated physical simulations. In this paper, we concentrate on the behaviors of highly viscous fluids, such as wax, lava, plastic, metal, chocolate, etc. We animate the smooth behaviors of viscous fluid based on a local 3D cellular automata. The dynamic changing volume data is rendered directly on a VolumePro board or texture mapping hardware to achieve an interactive speed.