Leapfrog Flow Maps for Real-Time Fluid Simulation
Yuchen Sun, Junlin Li, Ruicheng Wang, Sinan Wang, Zhiqi Li, Bart G. van Bloemen Waanders, Bo Zhu · ACM Transactions on Graphics · 2025
We propose Leapfrog Flow Maps (LFM) to simulate incompressible fluids with rich vortical flows in real time. Our key idea is to use a hybrid velocityimpulse scheme enhanced with leapfrog method to reduce the computational workload of impulse-based flow map methods, while possessing strong ability to preserve vortical structures and fluid details. In order to accelerate the impulse-to-velocity projection, we develop a fast matrix-free Algebraic Multigrid Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient (AMGPCG) solver with customized GPU optimization, which makes projection comparable with impulse evolution in terms of time cost. We demonstrate the performance of our method and its efficacy in a wide range of examples and experiments, such as real-time simulated burning fire ball and delta wingtip vortices.