How are Volumetric Effects made within games? (e.g. Smoke/Fire)

Question

For computer generated volumetric elements such as clouds, fire, and whitewater.

How are they made? Is it just a simple collection of particles [put to pixels] taken from Physics equations or are the like textures?

How are they applied? I would assume not from UV mapping

enter image description here

Derbis, smoke and fire come from the vehicle.

related http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/54871/what-is-billboarding-and-can-should-it-be-used-in-3d-games-to-create-special-ef — concept3d, Feb 06 '14 at 23:09
@XGundam05 that is my answer - tells me absolutely everything how to render fluid phenomena and how to seamlessly integrate fluid rendering into an existing rasterization-based framework, as told. Including the physics. The only problem is that I dont understand Partial Differential Equations so I dont think Il ever get a chance to work on stuff like this :/ — Sad CRUD Developer, Feb 07 '14 at 21:07

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 07 '14 at 11:08

Particle emitters with additive/multiplicative blending?

http://www.pxleyes.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/fumefx.jpg

Maybe you mean something different? But I think the effects in that screenshot is made out of particles with additive blending, and then overlayed with particles with multiplicative blending (the darker parts).

How are Volumetric Effects made within games? (e.g. Smoke/Fire)

1 Answers1