Real-time cartoon rendering of smoke
Morgan McGuire, Andi Fein, Colin Hartnett · 2004
We render amorphous shapes like smoke, clouds, and fluids with two-tone shading, self-shadowing, and silhouettes, in the style of a cartoon. Our method operates directly on a particle system without ever forming a surface mesh. It renders only five polygons per particle and executes primarily on the GPU. It can be extended to isosurfaces and volume data sets, and has applications in games, animation, and visualization. Our implementation renders thousands of particles at 30 fps and never reads the frame buffer.