CG Fire Simulation in Films and Games: A Comparative Study
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54097/8727ht97Keywords:
Fire Simulation, Fluid Simulation, Particle Systems, Neural Rendering, AI Video Generation, Computer-Generated Imagery.Abstract
Fire shows up constantly in film visual effects and in video games, which makes it one of the most widely used - and hardest to get right - effects in computer graphics. This survey covers fire simulation work published between 2006 and 2026, picking out 54 papers that we think are broadly representative of the field. We sort these methods into six families: physics-based simulation, particle systems, procedural and data-driven approaches, neural style transfer, neural reconstruction, and AI-based video generation. Within each family we review the main techniques and weigh them against one another on physical fidelity, computational cost, temporal consistency, visual realism, and how much control an artist actually ends up with. We close by summarizing where the field seems to be heading and flagging the problems that still need to be solved.
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