Random screen shot of the day

I realised that I haven't been posting much here recently, so I decided to post some of the random images that are sitting around on my hard drive gathering dust. These are from a 2D CUDA fire simulation which I submitted as a talk to Siggraph this year, but was cruely rejected. I'm still sulking about this, but I guess I shouldn't feel too bad since we were up against ILM, Dreamworks and DNeg, none of whom are exactly amateurs in the simulation department. The technique is based on Chris Horvath and Willi Geiger's excellent paper from Siggraph 2009. In my opinion one of the most interesting contributions of this paper is its use of a noise texture which is advected (i.e. moved) by the velocity field, and used to add detail to the rendering and simulation. The simulation code is based on Mark Harris's chapter from GPU Gems 1, and he helped optimizing the CUDA solver. The idea was to use this to replace those obviously repeating animated fire sprites you see in many games these days - you would run a bunch of small independent simulations on the GPU and display them on billboards. Anyway, hopefully someday soon I'll finish this up and release the code!