Modeling Lava Flows with a Particle System

CS348c Final Project

by Lucas Pereira and David Hsu

Volcanos and Lava

Volcanos around the world exhibit a wide range of behavior. Some of them, like Mount St. Helens in Washington, erupt violently, spewing millions of tons of gases, ash, and cinders into the atmosphere. Other volcanos, like Kilauea in Hawaii, emit a continuous flow of lava. For our project, we attempted to model continuous lava flows, such as these:


We generated a movie of lava flowing down a volcano. The camera pans around the volcano while the sun sets, giving views of the volcano under different lighting conditions:

lava.mpg (453 KB)


The lava was modeled with a particle system, and the volcano was modeled as a height field over a grid. This implementation allowed us to simulate particle motion, heat transfer, and volcano formation. We made optimizations to improve efficiency, sometimes at the expense of physical accuracy. For more details, see our implementation page.


David Hsu (
Lucas Pereira (