Particle Systems

Smoke, Fountain, and Fire Simulation

CMPS 161 - Final Project Winter 2008
Georg Albrecht

Description

The reason for doing this project was because I wanted to experiment with particle systems. A particle system is a group of individual particles. The particles are given simple rules that govern their interactions with each other and the surrounding environment. Despite the simplicity of these rules the results can be very realistic.
All particles need several basic attributes so that they can be easily manipulated. Some of these basic attributes are:

Current position
Velocity
Color
Lifetime and age

Other attributes may include

Scale, if you which to change its size.
Accleration, such as gravity.
Transparency, if the particle fades aver time.
The list goes on...

My program uses all of the above attributes. By changing the color, directional pulls (such as gravity), lifetime, and starting velocities I was able to simulate smoke rising, a water fountain, and fire.

Running Envirnment and Controlls

This program was developed in Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition and uses the OpenGL and GLUT libraries. A link to the executable program is given below. To run in Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition, open a new console project, add source files and .raw files, compile, and run. The controls are:

1: Smoke
2: Water Fountain
3: Fire
4: Fire with Smoke
+/-: Increase/decrease wind strength along the x axis.
[/]: Increase/decrease strength of gravity
Esc: Exit program

Renderings

Smoke

Smoke with wind pushing to the right

Smoke with wind pushing to the right then left

Water Fountain

Water Fountain with wind just starting to push to the left

Water Fountain with increased gravity

Fire

Fire with strong wind to the right and increased gravity

Fire with Smoke

Fire with Smoke with light wind picking up to the right

Program with source code

Particle System.exe: This requires that you download particle.raw and particle_mask.raw below. Place them in the same direcory.
main.cpp, System.h, System.cpp
particle.raw, particle_mask.raw: The program should still run if you don't download the .raw texture files, however it will display boxes, which don't look as nice.

Refrences

Donald Urquhart, Basic Particle Engine, http://www.swiftless.com/tutorials/opengl/particles.html
DongGyu Park, et al. A Fire and Smoke Simulation for Mobile Game, International Journal of Software Engineering and Its Applications, Vol. 2, No. 4, October, 2008
Fengdi Yang, Smoke Simulation, November 30, 2002, http://www.cs.usask.ca/grads/fey399/ProjectReport829.htm
NeHe Productions, Lesson 19: Particle Engine Tutorial, http://nehe.gamedev.net/data/lessons/lesson.asp?lesson=19
Pollitt, Edward. Real Time Smoke Simulation on Graphics Hardware, May 23, 2006

I also used the file reader for .raw files from http://www.swiftless.com under the OpenGL tutorials.