The Blog of Anders Nissen

fredag, december 17, 2004

Virtual Fluids

I think that having realistically behaving and looking water is going to be a red hot topic in game programming in the near future. It's already looking really promising.

Takashi Amada is researching how to compute and simulate fluids in real time. He writes:
Rendering realistic moving water is one of the key techniques that immerse the viewers into interactive graphics world including computer games. Physical simulations based on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is useful for rendering the realistic behaviour of water.
However, real-time fluid rendering has been one of the challenging tasks because of high computational cost of CFD. According to the recent development of programmable graphics hardware, many graphics functions are replaced by hardware processors.
In this research we propose real-time particle-based fluid simulation with Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) on Graphics Processing Unit (GPU).

Go to Takashi's research webpage to view an awesome screen capture movie of the fluid simulation running. It looks stunningly, and apparently the source for the demo is being release sometime after march 2005.
Meanwhile there's a few short technical documents on how to simulate fluids that will help you pass the time.