Leapfrog Flow Maps for Real-Time Fluid Simulation

📢 We’re excited to share that our paper, “Leapfrog Flow Maps for Real-Time Fluid Simulation,” co-authored with Dr. van Bloemen Waanders from DOE Sandia National Laboratories, has just been accepted to SIGGRAPH 2025! Leapfrog Flow Maps (LFM) combine velocity and impulse updates via a leapfrog integrator, and all the heavy lifting is handled by a matrix-free AMGPCG solver tuned for GPUs. The result? Real-time delta-wingtip vortex simulations at 256 × 128 × 128 resolution on a single RTX 4090. Key highlights from our paper: 📌 A hybrid velocity-impulse time integrator to reduce both the projection times and the flow-map marching steps 📌 A fast matrix-free Algebraic Multigrid Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient (AMGPCG) solver on GPU 📌 Large-scale fluid simulations in real time, such as fire balls and delta wingtip vortices 📌 Open-source code now available to the community See our paper and code for more details!
Please tryout our code and checkout out our simulation video below!📄 Paper Website & Preprint 🎞️ Simulation and validation videos 💻 Source Code
Full Abstract We propose Leapfrog Flow Maps (LFMs) to simulate incompressible fluids with rich vortical flows in real-time. Our key idea is to utilize a hybrid velocity-impulse scheme, enhanced with the leapfrog method, to reduce the computational workload of impulse-based flow map methods while maintaining a strong ability to preserve vortical structures and fluid details. To accelerate the impulse-to-velocity projection, we develop a fast matrix-free Algebraic Multigrid Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient (AMGPCG) solver with customized GPU optimization, which makes the projection comparable to impulse evolution in terms of time cost. We demonstrate the performance of our method and its efficacy in a wide range of examples and experiments, including real-time simulated burning fireballs and delta wingtip vortices.
Next Steps Following this work, we will continue our collaborative efforts by further exploring real-time CFD techniques, providing high-speed and high-fidelity simulation solutions to address various vorticity-dominant flow phenomena. Combustive dynamics on flow maps will be one of our particular focuses for the next steps.