Pseudorandom Noise for Real-Time Volumetric Rendering of Fire in a Production System

Abstract

This paper presents an effort at developing a robust, interactive framework for rendering 3D fire in real-time in a production environment. Many techniques of rendering fire in non real-time exist and are constantly employed by the movie industry and have directly influenced and inspired real-time fire rendering, including this paper. Macrolevel behavior of fire is characterized by wind fields, temperature and moving sources and is currently processed on the CPU while micro-level behavior like turbulence, flickering, separation and shape is created on the graphics hardware. This framework provides a set of tools for level designers to wield artistic and behavioral control over fire as part of the scene. The resulting system is able to scale well, to use as few processor cycles as possible, and to efficiently integrate into an existing production environment. We present performance statistics and assess the feasibility of achieving interactive frame rates within a 3D engine framework. The framerates we obtained vary from 42 to 168 depending on the rendering conditions, and indicate that the real-time procedural fire might not be far away.