Fluid simulation

Fluid simulation in computer graphics is a increasingly popular method to generate realistic simulations of water, smoke, explosions and the like. On the configuration of parameters of the simulation device and the scene geometry of the simulator develops the movement of the liquid as a function of time by using the (often much simplified ) Navier -Stokes equations, which describe operations in physically correct Newtonian liquids and gases. In the field of computer graphics simulations occur in a wide range of applications on areas ranging from very rudimentary real-time animations for video games to extremely computationally complex effects for movies.

Method

There are numerous techniques to achieve these simulations. Among the most used are the Eulerian grid -based method, the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH ) method and the lattice Boltzmann method. They were created by research in the context of computational fluid dynamics and have continuously improved.

Development

The earliest experiments in computer graphics to solve the Navier -Stokes equations were made ​​in 1996 by Nick Foster and Dimitris Metaxas, whose work is mainly based on a work on computational fluid dynamics by Harlow & Welch in 1965. Based on their work, methods have quickly developed with techniques in lower dimensions, such as 2D shallow water models and semi -random, turbulent noise fields.

Published in 1999 Jos Stam on the SIGGRAPH conference, the so-called stable fluids method, which use the semi - Lagrangian scheme and the direct integration of the liquid viscosity brought forth exceptionally good results and also allowed a much faster simulations. This technique was again developed by Ron Fedwik and his group 2001-2002 in order to allow more complex 3D water simulations using the level set method. A in this context to be named as important developers are Ron Fedkiw, James F. O'Brien, Mark Carlson, Greg Turk, Robert Bridson, Ken Museth and Jos Stam.

Software

In commercial 3D environments several possibilities for fluid simulation are available. A popular open source version is Blender 3D with a relatively high quality, implemented Lattice -Boltzmann method. Another popular option is because Glu3d, a plug-in for 3ds Max that is very similar to the performance of Blender's simulation. There are also RealFlow, FumeFX, Afterburn for Max, ICE SPH Fluids for Softimage or DPIT for Cinema 4D.

• Computer simulation