Real-time fluid simulation techniques

physics simulation fluid
Ben picture Ben · Nov 8, 2011 · Viewed 8.8k times · Source

What techniques are used for the real-time simulation of fluids such as water, for example in videogames?

In particular, I am looking for a project-idea for an (unfortunately rather short) physics project at Uni, so the simpler the better (if there is any such thing as "simple" in fluid-simulations...)

Answer

Dmitry Sapelnikov picture Dmitry Sapelnikov · Nov 8, 2011

AFAIK the most popular method to simulate fluids in real-time is the SPH method:

It's implemented in Bullet, PhysX, and Fluids:

Fluids v.3 is a large-scale, open source fluid simulator for the CPU and GPU using the smooth particle hydrodynamics method. Fluids is capable of efficiently simulating up to 8 million particles on the GPU (on 1500 MB of ram).

Some other helpful sources:

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