Quote:Original post by wyrzy
I'm thinking of using the marching cubes algorithm for rendering the fluid. That should take care of problem of not having the mesh geometry, right?

Hmmmm...well, "level set" kind of refers to the idea of extracting isosurfaces/isocurves out of a continuous field solution. "Level set" does not refer to the actual fluid simulation technique, e.g., it is not the underlying method of solving for the continuous fluid field. So, the gridded result is the discretized continuous field solution. I'm rambling here, to may be clarify things for some people in the audience.

Yes, marching cubes is one way to extract a surface. Effectively....marching cubes gives you the mesh geometry even if you always compute on-the-fly and never actually store the mesh to cached data structures. So, that would work. And the marching cubes patent expired last year, I believe, so you could even use it in a commercial game without having to pay royalties (though I'm no lawyer).

The idea I gave, using a specialized alpha channel...was meant to completely replace the need to do something like marching cubes. And is quite truly simple in the 2D case---quite a bit simpler than marching cubes, but with potentially dirtier results. Could be done in 3D (volume fluids) too, but wouldn't be nearly as successful due to limited texture memory for volume textures... More rambling.