Leapfrog Flow Maps for Real-Time Fluid Simulation

Fig. 1. Burning fire ball (left), delta wingtip vortices (middle left), helical trail behind a wind turbine (middle right), two connecting vortex rings (right).

We propose Leapfrog Flow Maps (LFM) to simulate incompressible fluids with rich vortical flows in real time. Our key idea is to use a hybrid velocityimpulse scheme enhanced with leapfrog method to reduce the computational workload of impulse-based flow map methods, while possessing strong ability to preserve vortical structures and fluid details. In order to accelerate the impulse-to-velocity projection, we develop a fast matrix-free Algebraic Multigrid Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient (AMGPCG) solver with customized GPU optimization, which makes projection comparable with impulse evolution in terms of time cost. We demonstrate the performance of our method and its efficacy in a wide range of examples and experiments, such as real-time simulated burning fire ball and delta wingtip vortices.