This technology demo shows the simulation and visualisation of stylised and realistic fluid running in real-time on consumer-level hardware.
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Fluid Demo v1.00 for Windows (2.83 MB)
Minimum hardware: Pentium 4 or equivalent, PS2.0 capable graphics card (NVIDIA GeForce 6800 or ATi 9700 upwards) Minimum software: Microsoft Windows XP, Microsoft DirectX 9.0C, Microsoft XNA Framework v1.0 Refresh (included), Microsoft .NET 2.0 SP1 |
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The fluid simulation physics are based on the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method with a simplified version of the Navier-Stokes fluid equation. Around 1000 particles are simulated in this demo. The engine also supports particle collision against geometry such as cylinders, spheres and planes.
There are two rendering methods in this demo; image-based and mesh-based. The mesh-based method generates a mesh for the fluid using the marching cubes algorithm, and is useful for fluids with reflection and refraction as such effects require accurate normals. The last scene in the demo uses this method, together with a custom shader which contains: transparency, fresnel term, phong highlight, reflection and refraction with chromatic aberrations.
The image-based method renders each particle as a sphere into multiple textures. Each texture contains different information such as normals, view direction and depth. An instancing shader is used to render multiple spheres in as few batches as possible. The normals texture is blurred to make the spheres bleed into each other, thereby smoothing the shading between the spheres. Finally, using a deferred rendering shader, the textures are composited together with phong rendering to give the final fluid image.
This demo was written in C# and uses the XNA framework.
A short video showing the three different scenes of the fluid demo in action.
