water physics?

[UltraProAnti]

Anyone ever wondered how the physics of liquids might be modelled (in any future game)? I mean, say there was a glass tank full of water, and you shoot the tank so it shatters and all the water pours out all over the floor. Any thoughts?

 

[Drealoth]

That's not going to happen for a while. Right now all that water is is a nifty shader effect.

 

[Ames]

It will be years before computers can do this in real-time. At most, we'll be able to do some sort of jelly. There was a simulation somewhere that was calculated using the GPU. Didn't try it out but it looked pretty cool.

 

[Limpet]

Simulating the flow of water real-time would be very demanding I'd think, while its probably possible on the high end computers I don't think its very practicle, or profitable right now.

 

[bliink]

It would have to be done on a molecular level, which means you'd need a computer with a lot of CPU grunt.

 

[The Dark Elf]

Anyone ever wondered how the physics of liquids might be modelled (in any future game)? I mean, say there was a glass tank full of water, and you shoot the tank so it shatters and all the water pours out all over the floor. Any thoughts?

To do it in realtime you'd setup parameters and particles and simply tell them how to interact with each other. Which would give you the basic water (like really big blobs of liquid) and then use shader effects to fill in the bits inbetween, giving it a more blobby look where the particles appear to have volume and interact together. From there you'd use other effects to make that appear broken up and more like liquid.

Far from perfect but any more than that, yep gonna need a powerful PC, throw in AI, realtime rendering, other calculations, the game, its not gonna happen properly for a while. But you can get the basics running in realtime at the moment, but I _mean_ basics. Pre-calculated is almost there, another few years maybe, realtime is usually a few years behind that.

 

[Iced_Eagle]

Yea we are getting closer, not there yet... A japanese super-computer can run this stuff (it was the most powerful supercomputer in the world until IBM unleashed their new beast 2 years ago I thiink it was) and they had water simulations up the yin-yang on a molecular level... Not real-time, but at least we can do it

 

[Physicles]

If you're at all interested in the topic, I suggest you check out

http://www.cfd-online.com/

It's not that it needs to be done at the molecular level, but that you only need to construct your fluid model on a fine enough scale that the player can't tell the difference. Physics in current games is a gross approximation anyway. The first interactive CFD will be a very ugly, very clever hack.

With the recent bounds we've seen in graphics hardware power, and the imminent shift to parallel computing (dual core, etc.), I don't think dedicated physics boards are that far off. And it seems like CFD is one of those problems you can throw more parallelism at to make it go faster...

hmm... all this talk makes me want to check it out

 

[Limpet]

Someone that was working with maya made real-time fluid simulation (not in maya I think). Ended up putting in on a pda.

You can watch a video about it Here
Watch for Jos Stam

 

[FireCrack]

A very simplified model for predefined water volumes would be possible. But then why not just script it?

 

[UltraProAnti]

Scripting would kinda defeat the object of water physics. I'm thinking some kind of dynamic morphing mesh (with added splash fx), whose behaviour is dictated by a nifty physics model. Modelling at the 'molecular' level seems a little excessive for a game.

 

[cereal]

Call me sick, but this kind of technology would make the best blood effects ever. It would actually spray/ pour out of someone when they die or get shot. And drip. And stuff. But anyway don't expect anytihng like this for a while. And when I say a while I mean a very long time.

 

[The Dark Elf]

Call me sick, but this kind of technology would make the best blood effects ever. It would actually spray/ pour out of someone when they die or get shot. And drip. And stuff. But anyway don't expect anytihng like this for a while. And when I say a while I mean a very long time.

that blood dripping down walls depending on the type of textures/normals thing is easy, well easy as in its possible at the moment, qck showed me an example of it ages ago.

 

[Deleter]

or gush out of their arm socket. (a little too much monty python )

 

[johnshafft]

or kill bill

Im curious on how the unreal engine 3 will handle fluids. I hate thier current method, as you cant create moving fluid areas

 

[LordBug]

Have a look at these:
http://meqon.com/downloadarea/downloadarea.php
The 1.4 physics engine demo has a scene for liquid dynamics. It's really quite nice. I'd like to see something like that in games, or at the very least, something akin to the water in Morrowind when you have shaders enabled. Very nice to see a ripple following you as you swim along

http://www.strangebunny.com/techdemos.php
This fluid simulator is better than the Meqon one. Very pretty.

They're not videos. You can affect the liquid yourself (To a limit unfortunately) to see how it plays. And they both play rather nicely. The future of gaming, I hope.

 

[Dead-Inside]

The meqon one sucks quite badly, it doesn't do anything special and I doubt it'd look very good, even with shaders applied.

 

[Physicles]

Have a look at these:
http://www.strangebunny.com/techdemos.php
This fluid simulator is better than the Meqon one. Very pretty.

Sweet. And that SIGGRAPH paper looks intriguing. (I'm downloading the Directx9 SDK so I can see the demo)

I'll bet today's bleeding edge systems could run a 10,000 particle simulation at 60fps. Perhaps we aren't as far from real-time water as we think...