Modelling of smoke flow taking obstacles into account

Recently, displaying natural phenomena such as smoke has become a topic of interest in computer graphics. The ability to simulate the complex shapes and motion of the smoke particles is not only important but is also a difficult problem to solve. In this paper, we propose a method of displaying swirling smoke, including the consideration of its passage round obstacles. By using the idea of metaballs, we can easily represent the 3D density distribution of smoke. We solve the physical equation of the flow, and represent the vortices by using the vorticity vector. Therefore, we can make a model of the smoke flow even if there are obstacles in its path.