This paper has attempted to simulate the microstructure formation based on fully coupling of temperature field, concentration field and velocity field with micro-kinetics. The authors presented a new way, which is the combination of FDM and cellular automata (CAFD) to visualize the microstructure formation of the thin complex superalloy turbine blades cast by the vacuum investment process. The distribution, orientation and mechanism of the heterogeneous nucleation, the growth kinetics of dendrites and the columnar to equiaxed transition (CET) are considered. Capitalizing on these simulating schemes, the comprehensive influence of key process variables on the scale and uniformity of grains has been investigated quantitatively. The simulated grain size and morphology agree well with the experimental results. This paper has attempted to simulate the microstructure formation based on fully coupling of temperature field, concentration field and velocity field with micro-kinetics. The authors presented a new way, which is the combination of FDM and cellular automata (CAFD) to visualize the microstructure formation of the thin complex superalloy turbine blades cast by the vacuum investment process. The distribution, orientation and mechanism of the heterogeneous nucleation, the growth kinetics of dendrites and the columnar to equiaxed transition (CET) are considered. Capitalizing on these simulating schemes, the comprehensive influence of key process variables on the scale and uniformity of grains has been investigated quantitatively. The simulated grain size and morphology agree well with the experimental results.