Real-Time 3D Simulation of Heat-Induced Air Turbulence

TL;DR

This paper introduces a real-time 3D simulation framework for heat-induced air turbulence that accurately models optical distortions by coupling thermal transport, fluid dynamics, and refractive light transport, enabling interactive visualization.

Contribution

It presents a novel fully 3D Lagrangian approach combining thermal flow simulation with curved ray tracing for realistic, multi-view consistent turbulence visualization in real time.

Findings

Runs at approximately 40 fps in prototype

More accurately matches real video distortions than previous methods

Captures complex, depth-dependent optical effects

Abstract

Heat-induced air turbulence produces complex, depth-dependent image distortions that are challenging to reproduce interactively because thermally driven flow must be coupled with refractive light transport. Existing real-time methods often rely on single-view 2D screen-space warps that break multi-view coherence and do not model a 3D refractive volume. We present a real-time, fully 3D Lagrangian framework that models the full pipeline from thermal transport to density variation to optical refraction. Our system augments compressible Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) with temperature transport, buoyancy, and pressure-driven motion to capture rising plumes and turbulent mixing. We render the resulting continuous refractive-index field via curved ray tracing to model light bending in 3D. To reconcile physical fidelity with interactive performance, we introduce spatially adaptive step-size integration for curved-ray tracing, refining steps near strong refractive-index gradients while relaxing them in smooth regions to preserve temporal stability and high-frequency distortion detail without uniform oversampling. The system runs at interactive rates (about 40 fps in our prototype) and matches depth-dependent, multi-view-consistent distortions observed in real video captures more closely than image-based baselines.