myzek 3 days ago

So once upon a time I stumbled upon simulating fluids in gamedev and I really wanted to learn how it works. Fast forward 2 months and I decided to write down everything I learned to hopefully make it easier for others in the future!

  • magicalhippo 3 days ago

    Fluid sims are just so darn fun! Nice writeup, very accessible.

    Couple of notes, I think you forgot to apply timestep when adding rocket exhaust velocity, pretty sure it should be

      u[idx] += backward.x * flame_velocity_amount * falloff * delta
      v[idx] += backward.y * flame_velocity_amount * falloff * delta
    

    You need to compensate by scaling up flame_velocity_amount, I used 85, seemed about the same.

    • myzek 3 days ago

      Yeah it seems I missed that, adding the rocket at the end was a cherry on the top and I was so exhausted already I'm surprised it even works lol

      • magicalhippo 2 days ago

        It made it very fun to play with though :D

  • nick__m 6 hours ago

    excellent article, great vulgarisation and human written !

    Thank you

  • brandonpelfrey 5 hours ago

    Great job. I have spent a lot of time working on fluid simulations (I still am). Glad to see more people still mesmerized. If you’re interested, this rabbit hole goes very deep.

Stevvo 5 hours ago

For anyone wanting to dive further, Fluid Simulation for Computer Graphics by Robert Bridson is the definitive textbook.

markstock 3 hours ago

Before you go adding vorticity confinement, consider performing a higher-order backward advection scheme (Runge-Kutta 2nd or similar), and using a higher-order interpolation method (triangle-shaped cloud instead of bilinear).

In my implementations I use 4th order for both and vortices stick around a lot longer.

jedimastert 2 hours ago

I appreciate the AI disclosure, I hope that becomes normalized

amarant 4 hours ago

This is great! When I have some leftover time I want to try copying this implementation for 3D. I reckon I could get away with minimal modifications to support the third axis...I think...

That'll perform even worse though, hopefully my CPU can handle it or I'm gonna need a lot of leftover time to make a shader

  • markstock 4 hours ago

    You are correct: Stable Fluids extends to 3d relatively easily.

frankdlc222 3 days ago

This is really cool. I love how much detail you went into explaining the setup and walking through each piece of the simulation. Definitely bookmarking this to play around with later!

amelius 5 hours ago

Did they test if it satisfies the relevant conservation laws?

  • brandonpelfrey 5 hours ago

    It won’t satisfy those laws. It’s also not a goal though of this post.

    • amelius 4 hours ago

      I mean if you're writing a ray tracer and the reflected light has more intensity than the light sources, then that's not desired. You can have the same sort of thing going on with a fluid simulation.

      • markstock 4 hours ago

        One of the nice aspects of Stable Fluids is that you don't need to iterate the pressure correction terms to convergence. Just run a fixed number of Jacobi or Gauss-Seidel sweeps and keep performance consistent. The only drawback of this is some mass loss in areas, which for the present purposes is acceptable.

      • dahart 33 minutes ago

        Sure, but conservation in ray tracing is also a goal that not everyone has and isn’t required for teaching or games or making pretty & even plausible images. There are plenty of situations in both ray tracing and fluid simulation where conservation is not desirable.

analog8374 6 hours ago

Oh don't let us pinch zoom. That would be a disaster.

  • zamadatix 5 hours ago

    Assuming you mean the site - pinch zoom & pan works for me on Windows and iOS?

    • analog8374 5 hours ago

      well android chrome doesn't