| The Big Day |
Ok, it came. Thursday. Today I give my seminar lecture. Been working on it the whole week, I hope it’s going to go fine. I also had a weird thing happen to me yesterday in this context.
The paper I present uses Kolmogorov Spectrum in several stages to simulate a realistic turbulent system. Now, they didn’t explain what is Kolmogorov Spectrum in the paper (naturally) and I felt it is quite important to the understanding of the creation of fire. So I went to our science library and looked into books on thermodynamics, but couldn’t find anything. A friend offered I’ll go to find one of the physics professors and ask him.
I reached Prof. Meerson who was very kind and explained the subject in a general manner I could understand, without going too much into physical details. Anyway, he got interested in the lecture and asked for the time and place I’m giving it, saying he’ll drop by if he doesn’t have anything scheduled then.
Oh, boy.. He’ll come to the lecture just to see me give a (probably) twisted version of what he just explained to me… Hmm… wait a minute… Maybe I could direct the questions from the class to him… Not a bad idea… 
Anyway, I’ll be off to work out some notes for the slides. You can have a look at the final(?) version of the presentation. It’s almost 2 Megabyte, and it includes some images from Shrek. Wish me luck!
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Hi! My name is Vania, I’m a french 3d artist working in London, and I am currently lead dynamics on Troy at the Moving Picture Company. We are creating our own "Terminator3" like smoke simulator and renderer, got the idea in the famous paper Ilm released recently. I’ve achieved the "3d interpolation of 2d fluids" part of the problem, a developer is working on the raymarcher, and I am currently doing research on Kolmogorov spectrum used to break up cylindrical interpolation artifacts. That is how I found your page, in Google. The way you speak of Kolmogorov really caught my attention as I lack practical information on the subject. I am not a mathematician, I do have programing skills, but I’m before all a 3d artist, meaning though I understand a lot of what is said in Ilm’s paper I seek information on how to practically implement a Kolmogorov 3d field with the 3d interpolated field I have. From what I understood I think Kolmogorov spectrum theory is here used to produce some kind of turbulent field based on incoming data (the 3d interpolated field) rather than totally randomly, and to achieve realistic energy flow between different scales of patterns in your simulation. Is that correct? I just thought you might be willing to share some of your experience. It is indeed very difficult to find a level of information that is not too geeky for non-mathematicians on the subject…
Hope your presentation went well, thanks for your interesting research.
Vania
Hi Vania
Was nice to read your comment, my lecture (which was more then a year ago) went very well, indeed.
About the ILM article, I take it you’re talking about "Smoke Simulation For Large Scale Phenomena" presented lately on Siggraph 2003. I’m not yet familiar with the article though it looks interesting enough. I’ll sit and read it in the coming days. Actually, one of my friends at the lab is working on a smoke simulator which is more in the direction of the one presented in "Keyframe Control of Smoke Simulations" (Actually, he was deep into the work when that paper was published, but his results so far are considerably better). If you have questions in this subject he might be of some assistance.
About Kolmogorov Spectrum, first it is a physical issue and quite a complicated one. I’ll be happy to assist you with whatever information I can, but the simulation described in the paper I presented was not developed by me, so you might want to contact Arnauld Lamorlette (arnauld@pdi.com) or Nick Foster (nickf@pdi.com) from PDI/DreamWorks who wrote the paper. As I said, I’ll be happy to assist if I can - but since you’ve probably did some research yourself it would be easier if you’ll just ask me question by email.