Real-time rendering of burning solid objects in video games

Objects in 3D games are typically shell models, a polygon mesh representing the shell or skin of the object. While emulation of the behaviour of shell models under combustion is sufficient for many game applications and is fairly well studied, solid objects do in fact burn rather differently than shell objects. We show how to manipulate shell models so that they appear to burn as solid models. Since our burning objects will be only a small part of a video game, computation speed is of the essence. We demonstrate that our method uses only a fraction of the computational power available by implementing the computation on a modest GPU using CUDA.