Physically based volumic rendering
The idea is to render a scene based on solution of physically accurate fluid flow equations. The solution of the flow equations can accurately capture the volumic distribution of smoke, vapor and other volumic contents, from which physicaly realistic scenes of fire, smoke, vapor, cloud and even rainbows can be rendered.
The following are some pictures from internet. These effects are what we are aiming through this technology.
For solving the fluid equations, we can use commercial software such as Fluent or research software such as CDP. The output can be exported as a ASCII tecplot file, which can be easily read. The main question of the project is, given the spatial distribution of volumic material such as smoke, how to render to light reflection and scattering from the volumic material?
For the rendering competetion, one idea is to render a scene with killeroos ( or anything you want ) that is burning and emitting lots of smoke that all around on the scene. Please contact Qiqi Wang (qiqi@stanford.edu) if interested.