Interesting CFD demonstration

[Pup]

No idea how accurate or applicable this is, given that it's designed for gaming, but the real time interaction is pretty amazing.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WZZARzpckw[/youtube]

Here's a link to the math behind it, for those so inclined...

http://blog.mmacklin.com/publications/

[astracrazy]

o i saw this on my facebook looks good

[Lycoming]

Their goal here is to create realistic looking water effects that can be done on a standard desktop in real time with small enough elements that the result doesn't look like a pile of goop. In the process, they're using many approximations and simplifications in their modelling to generate usable solutions in 1-4 iterations. For scientific or engineering purposes, the solution is pretty much useless; it's there to look good, and part of that is obtaining solutions fast so you can do a decent framerate. Obviously, compromises have to be made, considering that my desktop computer, which is no slouch, takes up to 30 minutes to calculate a converged solution for a wing; and that's a 2D steady state solution, not a 3D time dependent multiphysics simulation run at 50 fps.

Water looks like crap in most video games, and this is a pretty impressive step forward in that regard, though concerns remain about whether or not this will end up limited to the Nvidia platform. It looks really, really good, and it does what it sets out to do. It is pretty impressive work, but don't ever confuse this with CFD done for scientific or engineering purposes. The solutions generated by this model are useless in that setting.

[Pup]

It's interesting though to see this and to think back - what was it, less than 15 years ago? - when I remember discussions about which teams were using CFD and what the systems were capable of. As usual, I remember people saying that McLaren had a huge leap on the other teams (leads which seem to only ever exist on forums like this ). I'd be curious to see how the results of something like this would compare to something from say 10 years back.

Anyway, there will be a time when the teams will be able to do this sort of real time manipulation with usable results. Surely there will always be a need for ever more complex calculations, but just as surely there will also be value in being able to tweak a design in real time.