3D World Magazine / September 2010
3D World Magazine -- Go With The Flow
Ten years ago, fluid simulation was solely for the big studios. Today, the technology is in the hands of home users. To mark the release of RealFlow 5, Jim Thacker looks back over a decade of technical innovation and discovers what we can expect in the future
There’s something about digitally simulated water that always quickens the pulse. Perhaps it’s the way in which it moves: the sinuous underlying flow breaking up into a ballet of drips and splashes. Perhaps it’s the complexity of the mathematics that generate it: the Navier-Stokes equations that describe the motion of fluids, and the computational methods used to bring them to the Combining digital water with live- action footage film in a giant tank, Titanic set the scene for a wave of innovation over the next decade screen – techniques with excitingly chunky names like smoothed particle hydrodynamics and PIC/FLIP simulation. Or perhaps it’s the sheer visceral thrill of seeing millions of tonnes of water crashing down around you…[see pdf for article]
