Visual simulation of shockwaves

We present an efficient method for visual simulations of shock phenomena in compressible, inviscid fluids. Our algorithm is derived from one class of the finite volume method especially designed for capturing shock propagation, but offers improved efficiency through physically-based simplification and adaptation for graphical rendering. Our technique is capable of handling complex, bidirectional object–shock interactions stably and robustly. We describe its applications to various visual effects, including explosion, sonic booms and turbulent flows. Furthermore, we explore parallelization schemes and demonstrate the scalability of our method on shared-memory, multi-core architectures.