Burning Cloth Simulation

Key Features:

• Cloth Simulation through 3D Mass Spring System
• Motion calculated using Eulerian integration
• Fully textured cloth object (0:03)
• Fire spreads across cloth, destroying cloth nodes, and emitting fire particles (0:03)
• Movable and rotatable camera (0:03)
• Realtime rendering

Performance:

• 30x30 cloth at a minimum of 48 fps on i7-8750H Processor and GTX 1060 Graphics Card
• Framerate visible on top right corner of video (slightly reduced due to recording software)

Challenges and Difficulties:

• When I made my original fire particle simulation, my fire was emitted around a single point. This allowed the simulation to appear somewhat realistic by having a lot of fire particles on screen at a time. With this simulation, as the fire particle emitters are spread out across a surface, I can't have nearly as many fire particles close to each other at a time. Thus, the trade-off between realism and performance is much more pronounced. I was able to tweak the aesthetic of the simulation to an acceptable state but the framerate still dipped heavily when the fire is at maximum coverage. At this point, I realized I forgot to sort my flame particles by depth. Once I did so, my simulation looked significantly better, allowing me to reduce the number of particles and achieve a better balance between aesthetics and performance.

Credits and Additional Information:

• Written in Processing 3
• PeasyCam Library by Jonathan Feinberg