[TUTORIAL] How to Simulate Smoke with Shaders
http://www.alanzucconi.com/2016/03/09/simulate-smoke-with-shaders/
This post will show how to simulate the diffusion of smoke using shaders. Creating realistic smoke in games has always been a challenge. The reason behind this is the fact that the large scale behaviour of smoke is determined by the complex interactions of billions of tiny particles, floating in air. Throughout the history of game development there have been many attempts to simulate smoke, mostly based either on particles or trails. Neither of these, however, are able to reproduce with fidelity the actual behaviours of a fluid when exposed to perturbations. To compensate for that, we need to simulate fluid dynamics. Like it happens with physics, you don’t actually need to simulate every aspects of fluid dynamics; you want something that looks good, but that is not too computational intensive.
Part 1. The Maths
Part 2. The Shader
Part 3. Simulating Turbulences