Fire Sprite Animation Using Fire-Flake Texture and Artificial Motion Blur

In this paper, we propose a sprite animation synthesis technique that can efficiently represent the fire-flake effects seen in the natural phenomenon of fire. The proposed method uses the actual fire video or animated fire video as inputs and performs the following steps: 1) Extraction of feature vectors that can predict the direction of flame from image, 2) calculation of artificial buoyancy field, 3) creation and advection of fire-flake texture, 4) calculation of artificial motion blur using buoyancy flow, and 5) high quality composition. First, we detect the edges from the image and calculate the feature vectors needed to calculate the artificial buoyancy field. The computed 2D feature vectors are integrated into the Navier-Stokes equation and used to calculate the buoyancy field, which generates and advects anisotropic fire-flake textures. Finally, we apply artificial motion blur according to buoyancy direction to improve composition result of sprite animation. As a result, this method is based on image synthesis, which is faster than the existing 3D simulation-based approach. Experimental results show that high quality results can be easily and reliably obtained. In addition, since the final result is a sprite animation format, it can be easily used in existing game engines.