  The past two decades showed a rapid growing of physically-based modeling of
fluids for computer graphics applications. In this area, a common top down
approach is to model the fluid dynamics by Navier-Stokes equations and apply a
numerical techniques such as Finite Differences or Finite Elements for the
simulation. In this paper we focus on fluid modeling through Lattice Gas
Cellular Automata (LGCA) for computer graphics applications. LGCA are discrete
models based on point particles that move on a lattice, according to suitable
and simple rules in order to mimic a fully molecular dynamics. By
Chapman-Enskog expansion, a known multiscale technique in this area, it can be
demonstrated that the Navier-Stokes model can be reproduced by the LGCA
technique. Thus, with LGCA we get a fluid model that does not require solution
of complicated equations. Therefore, we combine the advantage of the low
computational cost of LGCA and its ability to mimic the realistic fluid
dynamics to develop a new animating framework for computer graphics
applications. In this work, we discuss the theoretical elements of our proposal
and show experimental results.
