Modeling Lava Flows with a Particle System
CS348c Final Project
by Lucas Pereira and David Hsu
Volcanos and Lava
Volcanos around the world exhibit a wide range of behavior. Some of
them, like Mount St. Helens in Washington, erupt violently, spewing
millions of tons of gases, ash, and cinders into the atmosphere. Other
volcanos, like Kilauea in Hawaii, emit a continuous flow of lava.
For our project, we attempted to model continuous lava flows, such
as these:
Results
We generated a movie of lava flowing down a volcano. The camera
pans around the volcano while the sun sets, giving views of the
volcano under different lighting conditions:
lava.mpg (453 KB)
Implementation
The lava was modeled with a particle system, and the volcano was modeled
as a height field over a grid. This implementation allowed us to
simulate particle motion, heat transfer, and volcano formation. We made
optimizations to improve efficiency, sometimes at the expense
of physical accuracy. For more details, see our
implementation page.
Authors:
David Hsu (dyhsu@cs.stanford.edu)
Lucas Pereira (lucasp@cs.stanford.edu)