Marvyn Bailly

About This Simulation

The burning MB is a live solution of the Navier-Stokes equations for incompressible flow, running entirely on your GPU with WebGL. The flames are heat carried and lifted by the air around the letters; the lake below is a separate solver for the wave equation, and everything is drawn as ASCII as it is computed.

How to Interact

• Move the mouse: Blow wind through the flames and the trees
• Click and hold: Set the air on fire; drag to draw with flame
• Over the water: Trail ripples across the lake
• Hold fire at the trees: They catch, burn down, and grow back in time
• Arrows at the sides: Switch between the colour field and the night lake
• Settings: Switch the ASCII off, change its colours, or try other scenes

Techniques Used

• Semi-Lagrangian advection for unconditional stability
• Pressure projection via Jacobi iteration
• Vorticity confinement to keep the flames turbulent
• Buoyancy, so heat rises and the fire draws its own shape
• A leapfrog wave-equation solver for the lake, with reflections bent by its slope
• A GPU ASCII renderer that picks each glyph from the flow, edges and all

Acknowledgments

This implementation is inspired by Pavel Dobryakov's WebGL Fluid Simulation . Big thanks to Pavel for his outstanding work!

The ASCII rendering was inspired by bas3line's ascii.rest , a lovely library of animated ASCII art for the web.

Read the full technical explanation →