AbstractAn ongoing challenge in fluid animation is the faithful preservation of vortical details, which impacts the visual depiction of flows. We propose the Impulse Particle‐In‐Cell (IPIC) method, a novel extension of the popular Affine Particle‐In‐Cell (APIC) method that makes use of the impulse gauge formulation of the fluid equations. Our approach performs a coupled advection‐stretching during particle‐based advection to better preserve circulation and vortical details. The associated algorithmic changes are simple and straightforward to implement, and our results demonstrate that the proposed method is able to achieve more energetic and visually appealing smoke and liquid flows than APIC.