Controlling Simulated Explosions by Optimization and Prediction

This paper presents a method for controlling simulated explosions by prediction and optimization. Many methods have been proposed for simulating realistic explosion based on numerical fluid analysis. These methods are widely used in applications such as movies and computer games. In these applications, there is often a requirement for the explosion to conform to a specified final shape. The goal of our research is to meet this requirement by controlling the simulation so that the explosion evolves into a target shape specified by the user. The key ideas of our method are optimization of the initial velocities at the explosion source and predictive control of the simulation. Our method optimizes the initial velocities during the preprocessing step. Next, during the simulation, it predicts the future shape from the history of the explosion shape and controls the simulation to minimize the difference between the target shape and the predicted shape.