Progress Report

The honours project which I am currently carrying out involves a research into existing techniques for fluid simulations. These techniques are to be evaluated to determine if they can be used in a real-time environment with out tying up the CPU and also produce realistic visual results. A demo application of a technique will be produced to show a technique at work with the ability of user interaction included with it.

Work Done

Most of the work that has been done since the project began is research into the Jos Stam’s work especially into his techniques for stable fluids which is techniques required if the fluid is to be included in a game environment. Also research in to Navier-Stokes equations has been done to get a understanding how they are used and what each of the terms included in the equations mean. Once an understanding was developed then it was decided between me and my supervisor that it would be best to start building my application earlier because it will help me understand the functions of the Navier-Stokes equations more and also allow for more time if any problems occur. The class which contains all the functions of the Navier-Stokes equations has been created with some problems cropping up along the way. The main problem that occurred was the pointers used was not being evaluated correctly which took a couple of weeks to solve which is longer than I hoped but with me starting the application earlier and spending more time working on the application I believe I still have enough time to complete it.

Work in progress

Currently I’m working on creating the visual aspects of the fluid. I am trying to get a 2D grid which will show the changes of density within a fluid when a force is implied. This force will be applied by the use of a mouse click onto the grid which is something else that I am working on. The visual aspects are currently going to represent in DirectX.

Work still to be done

There is still work to be built into the application which will deal with stationary objects which I want to be included into the application. Another thing that needs to be achieved as well is the boundary calculations for the fluid. Currently at the moment it is set to a basic box but I plan on expanding it to have ‘free surfaces’ which is discussed by Nick Foster and Dimitri Metaxas. The application also has to be tested by looking at the performance of the application and the look of the fluid. Then once this application has been built the final report and presentation will be prepared and written up before the project completion date 22nd May.