Realistic Smoke Coming to Blender?

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Nils Thürey, who brought fluid simulation to Blender, has done it again! He’s co-author of a paper titled ‘Wavelet Turbulence for Fluid Simulation’, an algorithm which creates stunning smoke effects. Even though the algorithm is not implemented in Blender yet, the code is already available. Check out their site for some stunning videos!

Abstract from the paper:

We present a novel wavelet method for the simulation of fluids at high spatial resolution. The algorithm enables large- and small-scale detail to be edited separately, allowing high-resolution detail to be added as a post-processing step. Instead of solving the Navier-Stokes equations over a highly refined mesh, we use the wavelet decomposition of a low-resolution simulation to determine the location and energy characteristics of missing high-frequency components. We then synthesize these missing components using a novel incompressible turbulence function, and provide a method to maintain the temporal coherence of the resulting structures. There is no linear system to solve, so the method parallelizes trivially and requires only a few auxiliary arrays. The method guarantees that the new frequencies will not interfere with existing frequencies, allowing animators to set up a low resolution simulation quickly and later add details without changing the overall fluid motion.

Ton Roosendaal comments:

“Best news is that the code has been released as gpl! Blender developer Daniel Genrich is very interested in looking at integrating it, not to mention I would love to see it as Durian vfx!”

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    • Owen

      OMG OMG, will this code be available into blender 2.47 ?

    • MickyJimbo

      Ok…..now im excited…

    • Tim

      WOW

    • http://3d-synthesis.com ROUBAL

      Wow ! I hope that this feature will be included in Blender one day.

      Congratulations to the coders. This tool is really amazing !

    • http://www.blendernation.com Bart

      @Owen: “will this code be available into blender 2.47 ?”

      Read carefully ;-) “Blender developer Daniel Genrich is very interested in looking at integrating it”

      It may take a while before you can actually use this.

    • chimericidol

      I am also stunned!!! We own you so much Nils Thürey. Thank you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    • Owen

      @Bart > Hmm…..I see :-|

    • Charlie

      Don’t forget that Farsthary is also working on smoke, see http://farsthary.wordpress.com

      Exciting times ahead… :)

    • guran

      What is the difference between this and farsthary’s True Volumetrics ( http://farsthary.wordpress.com )?

    • Pixelvore

      Of course not. But what is showcased is really promising :)

    • Pixelvore

      (this was a response to Owen)

    • Hugh

      @Guran : Farsthary’s volumetrics make it possible to fake smoke using textures, whereas this will actually simulate smoke the way fluids are simulated, in a very realistic way (which would probably be a lot slower…)

    • Ruddy

      guran: Farshary’s method is a “classic” one: quick et realistic fluid simulaiton like Maya’s one, …this is perfect for little flames and smokes.
      It method enables realistic mid-sized flames and smoke with little cpu-power.. ..but still not sure about the original paper.
      But he is aware of this paper, simply he did the implementation in early august and Nils’paper code source was just published about a week ago…. Otherwise he would have already put the code inside blender..
      Daniel/Farshary could make a kick-ass team! ;)

    • Born

      I haven’t a clue as to what all the technical stuff means, but this sure sounds impressive!

    • Vassilios Boucer

      WOW!
      Great !The video demostrations looks Amazing!
      ..better have both methodes integrated!
      (Farstharys Volumetrics (Smoke Fire) and this from this Amazing Paper)
      because farstharys Smoke looks little different …so we have more Inovation and artistic free making smoke and fire…with many different methodes….etc.!
      Yeah!

    • Ruddy

      Farsthary will resume school (=daily internet connection) at the end of the month, so a branch should quickly be set up to optimize the volumetrics required for these effects.

    • PavelSiska

      Great things going on. I love Blender Community, it’s the most powerfull and most capable community in the world of internet. Go Blenderheads, GO!!! :)))

    • http://www.chronosom-studios.de DingTo

      Is it live or is it Blender?

      Damm man, this is really powerful and great. Keep on coding guys, please.

    • Ruddy

      Hugh: no, Farsthary code is also based on fluid physic: it shares the first steps of the Nils’ paper:
      1) fluid simulation based on Navier-Stokes equation (real fluid physics) on a coarse grid to consume little cpu-power
      2) extrapolation and smoothing on a higher definition grid to avoid grid artifact
      Nils: 3) information about energy density in the grid are used as basis to generate a detailled grid with vortices (vortices are here to dissipate the energy), the displacement of each vortex being given by the grid from 2)

      Hope this is a approximate resume

    • http://iluvblender.googlepages.com Satish ‘ILuvBlender’ Goda

      Nice research… would be great if we can get this into Blender

    • randomnut

      Neat!

    • http://www.arabblend.com samran

      wow

    • yoyoyoy

      amazing look! i´m asking myself if it would it lead to an advanced fluid-sim, too…actually, there seem to be a lot of problems with the obstacle-identification (slip-values and so on…) and the handling is more like trial-and-error then a controlled simulation…

    • http://mountuponwingsofeagles.blogspot.com Matt

      Yay, I can’t wait!

    • Toon Scheur

      @yoyoyoy: +1

      I was thinking along the same line. It seems a no brainer to me that this would also be applicable for the regular fluid sim. So basically, your massive fluid sim wouldn’t look like mud creeping along in the city streets, but brutal splashes everywhere. That was the main thing that was off in Ice Age 2 when the dam burst. The water looked like textured hair gel.

    • http://gordallott.wordpress.com gord

      you see, this is why i love open source software, it only takes one person out of all 6 billion of us on this little rock we call earth to think of doing something and voila, there it is.

    • http://minosafminosa.wordpress.com/ Benjamin Bailey

      great!

    • lexi

      *dreaiming of candy floss*
      So it is possible to make something like ink pured in water, or a sediment transporting river floating into another river or ocean? Red and whithe Nile or the big Amazonas.

    • Toon Scheur

      OMFG!! OMFG!!! Have you guys seen the latest changes on Farsthary site? This is the the best smoke simulation I have seen in Blender! Check out the soot/ smoke, I can almost smell the fuel burning.

    • http://blendernewbies.blogspot.com kernond

      Yeah, I hope they work together on this because Farsthary is a good ways down this road already. Great news!

    • Maurice Raybaud

      This smells good indeed…
      I hope these improvements can be unified and interact with the rigid and softbodies of the physics engine!

    • gat

      wow!!!! I am already thinking of all the things I be using it for lol YAM!

    • Brian Treacy

      I wonder if the algorithm can be added to the current particles system. I think it would be really cool to have objects move about like smoke.

    • Ruddy

      Hi Daniel/Nils/Farthary,

      as smoke requires volumetric, both smoke generation and smoke rendering should be as quick as possible,
      perhaps that you can take some points of this paper to optimize the smoke rendering:
      http://www.kunzhou.net/2008/smoke.pdf
      In this paper, the idea is to separate the smoke in 2 contributions through maths technics:
      * the low frequency smok = main one
      * the high frequency smoke = little variations due to vortices:
      Under certain lightning conditions, low frequencies can be realistically rendered in a less rigorous way, leading to great speed boost.
      This paper makes uses of a preprocessing step to separate the 2 kinds of smoke, but the smoke generated through Nils ‘ algorithm is by definition separated in the 2 contributions above, so this can achieve an overall algorithm (smoke generation + rendering) which is quicker!

      Thank for your contributions!:)

    • http://vgspectra.net Sephiroth the Bimbo Master

      OMG!!!

      I wolud like to see this code implemented in the blender 2.47 or Blender 2.5 for VFX in the Durian project

    • Rob Cozzens

      Excellent news. Looking forward to seeing this in Blender.

    • claas

      this is just sick madness ;)

      I hope it will make it into Blender soon !!!

    • http://www.FreezingMoon.org DreadKnight

      Tonight we dine in battle!

    • JBeale

      This smoke is most impressive simulation I have seen yet- fantastic results.

    • GraphicsKid

      Aww dammit! I just bought lightwave and the dynamite plugin because blender had none of this stuff! ($1200).

      Stuff from lightwave still looks better though (but I imagine that’ll change real soon).

    • Tony

      No pun intended but, holy smokes! This is so exciting it’s giving me the hiccups.

      Definitely the timing of this and Farsthary’s work couldn’t be better during the run-up to Durian. Great things in store for Blender!

    • http://www.qso.com/carlautta/colin/Beta/ Tynach

      GraphicsKid: You bought it? I downloaded the 30 day trial and a crack.

    • http://www.qso.com/carlautta/colin/Beta/ Tynach

      He hasn’t stated that he will develop this for Blender, but still, this is awesome nonetheless!

    • vidrazor

      Looks pretty cool. Still, there’s something weird about it, like those “ridges” in the plume shaft. Overall a little too water-ish. Nitpicking on research code, I know, but there’s things that still need to be done here to get it to behave more like real smoke. Perhaps simply more nonlinear deflections. The “ridges” stick out in my mind, tho. Hopefully this will be worked out beautifully.

    • fredpyo

      Amazing.

    • Howitzer

      Tynach, I wouldn’t talk about piracy here.

      GraphicsKid, you did good. By buying the software you have a legitimate right to use it. Those who like to break copyright to get stuff for free run the risk of being sued or worse.

      That said, I think this smoke thing is insanely awesome.

    • http://www.hamsterking.com JoOngle

      Awesome stuff
      *Waves hands in excitement*

      This was some stuff I really needed back when doing accident-simulations!

    • http://www.rgbk.org Bmud

      Ohhhhhh so cool! that made me stay up way past my bed time.

    • David Shan

      Damn… that’s “smokin’” hot! Can’t wait for it.

      Thanks, dudes!

    • http://www.blender3d.at carlinhos

      great news!!

    • http://www.qso.com/carlautta/colin/Beta/ Tynach

      Howitzer: I never used it, and I don’t have it anymore. So, I’m safe. Actually, I never even really installed it either. Just used Blender.

      vidrazor: Are you referring to the videos, or the images? I know that I thought the same things, until I saw the videos, and watched a real cloud of smoke. Sometimes you don’t realize how real something looks until you see the same effect in real life.

    • Eggyolk

      Looks long way from finished, but hey. it’s Nils. It’ll improve. btw, can you make it light the evniroment to, >.> we really need that. I can continue my vertex copy based area lights, but it’s not as good. or is lightcuts bringing that to us? nyway, it’d also make it a strong tool competing with FUMEFX and Afterburn. nice work on farthsays to. it’s great for when you don’t need a massive long calc fire effect, just a good candle or something.

    • http://www.ramraidersoftware.com Djfuego

      Holy Smoke Batman!

      That is an incredible simulation algorithum.. It looks so real.

    • free_ality

      I watched these vids just a couple weeks ago! Wow, it would be pretty amazing to see this in Blender, really smart stuff(haha, can you tell I’m not very algorithm savvy?).

    • http://home.deds.nl/~mp/ ysvry

      smoke is nice but i rather have caustics, I also see they still havent learned that “.MOV IS BAD ” ;P

    • http://darsam.spaces.live.com DramaKing

      I never thought that fluid sims could be used for smoke. This is something that I could really use!

    • redbyte

      I’ve got mixed feeling about those videos.

      At first my jaw dropped, my eyes were peeled to the screen and I started drooling.

      But then I got kinda sad, because I know sometimes new features like this never gets implented. Kinda like how a new cancer remedy hits news pages and then we never hear of it again.

      I guess you could argue that I should get off my arse and join the developing team to help out. And you’d be right there. So I’ll shut up :P

    • Sergeant Oreo

      I really am quite amazed at the intellect of programmers,
      especially the ones that work on Blender. They give us virtual
      tools with which to attempt to simulate and re-create the real world
      with more creativity.

      Thank you all Blender developers, especially Nils Thürey and Daniel Genrich!

    • Lars

      It looks very nice… BUT!

      – The wavelet turbulence makes all the turbulence look the same.. no variation, just the same uniform turbulence look all over the simulation. I hope its very tweakable when/if implemented

      – It won’t look good anyway without a decent volumetric rendering engine that handles shading and shadowing properly. (When is such a thing coming to blender?)

    • Charon

      Can’t stop watching it. Amazing!

    • Pedro

      i m trying to compile the open source in my mac but i cant… can anyone help me?

    • Pingback: The Smoke simulator is being integrated! « True Volumetrics for Blender