Dhanyu Amarasinghe and Ian Parberry, "Fast, Believable Real-time Rendering of Burning Low-Polygon Objects in Video Games", Proceedings of the 6th International North American Conference on Intelligent Games and Simulation (GAMEON-NA), pp. 21-26, EUROSIS, Troy, NY, 2011.
Abstract
Deformation of the low-polygon models used in in video games is challenging since it is hard to maintain realism. We show how real-time mesh refinement can be used for modeling the deformation and consumption of low-polygon models under combustion while generating procedural fire. Our focus is on trading realism for computation speed so that processing power is still available for other computational tasks. Our method also allows for quick and easy LOD (level-of-detail) rendering of burning objects. We have implemented and tested our method on a relatively modest GPU using CUDA. Our experiments suggest that our method gives a believable rendering of the effects of fire while using only a small fraction of CPU and GPU resources.
