1. A real-time animation system for producing an animation display of physical phenomena, wherein said physical phenomena is represented by simulation data generated by simulation programs, the real-time animation system comprising: host processing means for generating a stock geometrical element in the form of floating point geometrical element simulation data and byte width variable simulation data resulting from execution of a simulation program describing the physical phenomena; graphics processing means for generating element transformation matrices determined by the floating point geometrical element simulation data generated by the host processing means and for generating layer transformation matrices determined by the element transformation matrices and the variable simulation data; communication means for transferring the geometrical element simulation data and the variable simulation data from the host processing means to the graphics processing means; and wherein the graphics processing means generates a plurality of glyphs by combining the layer transformation matrices and the stock geometric element, each of the plurality of glyphs providing a geometrical representation of the physical phenomena for selected time periods of the simulation.