One final thing I wanted to achieve with smoke effects is to port the 2D simulation to 3D. Early results in pure AS3 were pretty disappointing, so again I turned to Pixel Bender and its speedy goodness. Still, the main obstacle was of course performance. The first step was to optimize the original 2D version…
Last night, I had the idea to take part of the previous fluid solver, but instead of placing the “ink” in a grid, I’d replace it with particles and have those move according to the velocity grid. It would give a stronger impression of detail. It didn’t look all that great from a realistic point of…
Thanks to Ralph Hauwert’s blogpost pushing a baffling >300.000 particles using Alchemy, I finally got the much needed motivation to try out Alchemy myself. To be able to get started asap, I decided to return to something I’ve done before: fluid and smoke dynamics, but with a different algorithm (see Mike West’s article on Gamedev).…
The third pass at smoke/fluids simulation again looks quite different from the previous two attempts, but this time it’s stable both when keeping still as while moving. Not surprisingly, as the current approach is more like Stam‘s fluid solver. The downside is that it’s much less processor-friendly: every new step (adding forces, diffusion, advection, updating boundaries, …)…
Last time, the results of simulating smoke were a bit instable and the visual result was a bit bland. Since then, I’ve been irked constantly by spotting smoke everywhere in the – real – world. And sadly, I have to admit I’m a smoker, so there’s no escape from that! :D So back to research!…