Hi. I've managed to implement the NSE-solvers in Jos Stam's GDC03-paper "Real-Time Fluid Dynamics for Games" without too many problems, and managed to get rather interesting movements in te volumes by simply adding manual velocities to it. This is rather useless though, since the whole point of making this in the first place is to get a rater physically correct fluid. So i'm trying to figure out how to apply forces to this volume. When i'm thinking about it it doesn't seem that there's an easy way of sticking Newtons second into the system, and i can't really come up with any other alternatives :( So please, help? Edit: I think i've done it, although im not sure if it's correct. Wouldn't it be correct to simply add the forces to the velocity? I had totally missed the +F in the equation, just spotted it. And i surely get results when i add the forces. Tobias Karlsson Sweden [Edited by - tok_junior on September 1, 2004 7:35:59 AM]

i dont completely understand what youre trying to say...

you managed to apply forces, but thats no good because you want to apply forces?

anyway, to make this usefull for games all youll have to do is set boundary conditions on the fluid according to your gameworld and objects, apply forces to your fluid according to moving objects, and optionally let the objects be influenced by the fluid flow.


experiment with setting arbitrary boundary conditions on the flow: i found this to be quite hard to get working quite right.

applying forces according to moving gameobjects shouldnt be that hard me thinks.

I think you misread/misunderstood. I've applied velocities, not forces. And now i want to add forces instead.

If you're willing to keep it simple and not let the objects influence the flow, then this seems like an easy problem...I'm ignorant of NSE...let me see...oh mathworld has it...well, it seems that you're basically working with a differentiable vector field that defines your velocity...why not just compute accelerations by differentiating w/respect to time, then you can multiply by mass to get forces, if that's what you want. Just keep in mind, you're talking about acceleration of fluid parcels, so you might multiply by the mass of a fluid parcel, which you can probably set arbitrarily. If the fluid parcel is infintesmal, you can then compute net forces on an object by integrating over the surfaces of the object in the fluid.

I suppose a more challenging problem would be to start with a scalar pressure field and kinematic velocity, and solve the differential equation for the velocity, but I can't imagine why you should happen to know these things for a game...

Yes, turned out to be very easy indeed.
Now the problem is my diffusion adds density to the system :(

EDIT:
Never mind, i really should start commenting out old lines before i insert the same lines in another place.
DOH!

Quote:Original post by tok_junior
Yes, turned out to be very easy indeed.
Now the problem is my diffusion adds density to the system :(

Which I suspect is because of numerical error? If so, either use a better integrator, or just renormalise your density every few iterations. If not, then you've incorrectly implemented the computation.

Cheers,

Timkin

I've noticed there's a major difference, it even looks as if nothing's added, if i use a high diffusion, say about 100.0. As I'm totally new to everything fluid, i have no idea what a normal diffusion-rate would be.
If someone could point at somewhere i can find rates for say water and smoke, i'd be a happy camper indeed. Or well, just giving me some general pointers on diffusion would work aswell.

By the way, as a first-time poster in this forum, i must say it's by far the best one i've seen on gamedev. Clean posts, and accurate information, especially by grhodes. Cudos to all of you, and thanks for helping out :)

>>If someone could point at somewhere i can find rates
>>for say water and smoke, i'd be a happy camper indeed.
>>Or well, just giving me some general pointers on diffusion
>>would work aswell.

Well, if you are after realworld physical parameters, you should first check two things:

1.) your timestep is realistic
2.) you take fluid density into account. meaning that if you have a force field F, you use the formula v += F/density to add forces to the velocities (these density parameters are easily found even in high school textbooks).

But diffusion rates are a different thing... as people have pointed out, fluid simulation (and especially the semi-Lagrangian method) causes so much artificial diffusion to the velocity field that in practice, no diffusion is even needed. Actually, there exist even methods that try to fight back artificial diffusion of turbulence by using a specialized force (a technique called vorticity confinement).

So in brief, even if you had the most accurate diffusion parameters in the world, the diffusion will still be unrealistically high.

Of course, finding such parameters might be an interesting exercise.

- Mikko