Editing smoke animation using a deforming grid

We present a new method for editing smoke animations by directly deforming the grid used for simulation. We present a modification to the widely used semi-Lagrangian advection operator and use it to transfer the deformation from the grid to the smoke body. Our modified operator bends the smoke particle streamlines according to the deformation gradient. We demonstrate that the controlled smoke animation preserves the fine-grained vortical velocity components and incompressibility constraints, while conforming to the deformed grid. Moreover, our approach enables interactive 3D smoke animation editing by using a reduced-dimensional subspace. Overall, our method makes it possible to use current mesh editing tools to control the smoke body. © 2017, The Author(s).