Navier-Stokes fluid simulation explained with Godot game engine

(myzopotamia.dev)

154 points | by myzek 3 days ago

11 comments

  • nlawalker 5 hours ago
    If you haven't tried Animal Well, give it a shot. The whole game and its custom engine are like 35MB and it's filled with really cool visuals and physics powered by fluid equations.

    https://store.steampowered.com/app/813230/ANIMAL_WELL/

  • myzek 3 days ago
    So once upon a time I stumbled upon simulating fluids in gamedev and I really wanted to learn how it works. Fast forward 2 months and I decided to write down everything I learned to hopefully make it easier for others in the future!
    • magicalhippo 3 days ago
      Fluid sims are just so darn fun! Nice writeup, very accessible.

      Couple of notes, I think you forgot to apply timestep when adding rocket exhaust velocity, pretty sure it should be

        u[idx] += backward.x * flame_velocity_amount * falloff * delta
        v[idx] += backward.y * flame_velocity_amount * falloff * delta
      
      You need to compensate by scaling up flame_velocity_amount, I used 85, seemed about the same.
      • myzek 3 days ago
        Yeah it seems I missed that, adding the rocket at the end was a cherry on the top and I was so exhausted already I'm surprised it even works lol
        • magicalhippo 2 days ago
          It made it very fun to play with though :D
    • brandonpelfrey 5 hours ago
      Great job. I have spent a lot of time working on fluid simulations (I still am). Glad to see more people still mesmerized. If you’re interested, this rabbit hole goes very deep.
    • nick__m 7 hours ago
      excellent article, great vulgarisation and human written !

      Thank you

  • genxy 5 hours ago
    The unlinked Jos Stam paper is available from his website https://www.dgp.toronto.edu/public_user/stam/reality/Researc...
  • Stevvo 6 hours ago
    For anyone wanting to dive further, Fluid Simulation for Computer Graphics by Robert Bridson is the definitive textbook.
  • markstock 4 hours ago
    Before you go adding vorticity confinement, consider performing a higher-order backward advection scheme (Runge-Kutta 2nd or similar), and using a higher-order interpolation method (triangle-shaped cloud instead of bilinear).

    In my implementations I use 4th order for both and vortices stick around a lot longer.

  • amarant 4 hours ago
    This is great! When I have some leftover time I want to try copying this implementation for 3D. I reckon I could get away with minimal modifications to support the third axis...I think...

    That'll perform even worse though, hopefully my CPU can handle it or I'm gonna need a lot of leftover time to make a shader

    • markstock 4 hours ago
      You are correct: Stable Fluids extends to 3d relatively easily.
  • jedimastert 3 hours ago
    I appreciate the AI disclosure, I hope that becomes normalized
  • frankdlc222 3 days ago
    This is really cool. I love how much detail you went into explaining the setup and walking through each piece of the simulation. Definitely bookmarking this to play around with later!
  • amelius 6 hours ago
    Did they test if it satisfies the relevant conservation laws?
    • brandonpelfrey 5 hours ago
      It won’t satisfy those laws. It’s also not a goal though of this post.
      • amelius 5 hours ago
        I mean if you're writing a ray tracer and the reflected light has more intensity than the light sources, then that's not desired. You can have the same sort of thing going on with a fluid simulation.
        • dahart 1 hour ago
          Sure, but conservation in ray tracing is also a goal that not everyone has and isn’t required for teaching or games or making pretty & even plausible images. There are plenty of situations in both ray tracing and fluid simulation where conservation is not desirable.
        • markstock 4 hours ago
          One of the nice aspects of Stable Fluids is that you don't need to iterate the pressure correction terms to convergence. Just run a fixed number of Jacobi or Gauss-Seidel sweeps and keep performance consistent. The only drawback of this is some mass loss in areas, which for the present purposes is acceptable.
  • nryoo 7 hours ago
    [flagged]
  • analog8374 6 hours ago
    Oh don't let us pinch zoom. That would be a disaster.
    • zamadatix 6 hours ago
      Assuming you mean the site - pinch zoom & pan works for me on Windows and iOS?
      • analog8374 6 hours ago
        well android chrome doesn't