Real-time GPU fluid simulation
It has been almost a month since my last post but I have a good excuse for not updating the blog. I’ve been busy implementing real-time fluid simulation on GPU based on article in GPU Gems 3. Once I had the simulation up and running I decided to improve the shadow mapping i.e. use fluid’s density to determine the softness of shadow. This required some tweaking of main VSM algorithm and once again NVidia’s PerfHUD proved to be a really usefull tool for tracking down those tricky little issues. Engine allows user to tweak shadow density per object, default settings allow smoke to cast more opaque shadow while fire has only very subtle shadow in bright daylight. Both smoke and fire refract the background, the amount of bending is determined by fluid’s density. Finally, here is the result 