When you see water effects inside games or other PC graphics applications, they almost always have very limited animations and interactions with the surrounding environment. This week, a programmer that works at NVIDIA on the PhysX team has uploaded some new videos that showcase a new way to create water effects that could change how water and other fluids are simulated in games.
Programmer Miles Macklin posted the videos on his blog side that show off what he and his fellow PhysX team members call Position Based Fluids. One of the videos, shown above, demos the technique running on an NVIDIA GTX 680 CPU in real time. As you can see, not only does the water flow and bounce around objects realistically, but there are added effects such as spray and foam that make the water look even better.
Macklin and his team have created a full paper on Position Based Fluids which has been submitted and accepted for a presentation at the upcoming SIGGRAPH 2013 conference. He states:
By formulating and solving a set of positional constraints that enforce constant density, our method allows similar incompressibility and convergence to modern smoothed particle hydrodynamic (SPH) solvers, but inherits the stability of the geometric, position based dynamics method, allowing large time steps suitable for real-time applications.
The end result is certainly one of the most realistic real time water effects we have ever seen and its likely that future PC games and graphics applications will use a version of this technique.
Source: Miles Macklin"s blog