Timothy Lyes

Citation

Thesis Title
GPU Accelerated Particle Methods for Simulating and Rendering Fire and Water Effects

Read article at Massey Research Online:

The simulation of complex natural phenomena such as fire and water is a complicated problem and with the surge in popularity of video games and other interactive media, it has become an area of interest in computer graphics to be able to simulate these phenomena in real-time. Several different modeling techniques were explored using particle systems, where these simulated effects are comprised of a large amount of small elements (particles). Mr Lyes analysed methods focusing both on computational aspects and visual aspects, comparing the strengths and weaknesses of each approach. These methods also employed parallelisation with graphics processing units, where instructions for many particles are executed concurrently to provide significant computational speed-up. The results show that the balancing of both computational and visual aspects is crucial in maintaining real-time interactivity of realistic renderings, and provide guidelines for the use of particle systems to achieve these realistic effects.

Supervisors
Dr Arno Leist
Professor Ken Hawick
Dr Daniel Playne