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Coding Adventure: Simulating Smoke

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Video / channel Intermediate

Sebastian Lague

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Description

This YouTube Coding Adventure video by Sebastian Lague builds a grid-based smoke simulation from first principles as one episode in the Coding Adventures series.

It covers modeling smoke as an incompressible fluid on a staggered velocity grid, simplified Navier-Stokes ideas, cell divergence, pressure-driven velocity updates, edge-stored velocity components, and live visualization of cells, arrows, and divergence while iterating the solver.

It is aimed at programmers who already write interactive demos and want an approachable path into Eulerian fluid solvers. Basic vector vocabulary helps. Viewers new to graphics math may need to pause on divergence and pressure projection.

The resource is a free YouTube video with spoken walkthrough, on-screen equations, and live coding of the fluid grid and debug drawing.

It is useful as a concrete visual introduction to Eulerian smoke ideas without a full CFD textbook, showing how debug drawing keeps the mental model aligned with the code.