Development surprise ;)

TADAAAAN! Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) for Blender particle system
(True Fluid Particles) 🙂 !

Hi everyone 🙂

Long time without posting huh? 😉 well , I have prepared a surprise , I have been making recently some research in the area of SPH simulators (don´t blame me, I found this while I was gathering resources for Bloxel and since its development is shorter than Bloxel I decided not keep the community waiting 😉 ) and came up with the first draft of SPH physiscs for the powerful Blender Particle System from Janne Karhu (aka Jahka).

For the ones who think that SPH means something related to the stars I have to tell that in some way you are right: SPH was firstly developed in 1977 for simulating astrophysical processes . The fundamentals of the SPH theory are the interpolation theory, the units in the SPH method represent a region in space and not a real particle, thus field variables (pressure,viscosity,velocity,color, etc) are found by averaging, or smoothing the field variables over a region of interest. SPH is often described as a rugged, robust technique that could easily be extended to N dimensions while Eulerian approaches (Grid based methods) suffer from the curse of dimensionality (computation grows exponentially with dimensions).

Pros:

• Arbitrary scene set ups , no need to define a domain.
• Intuitive and artist friendly.
• Possibility to handle arbitrary complex interactions like hetero-fluids simulations, and unexpected deformations.
• Robust, adaptable and extensible.
• Good results even with a low number of particles.
• Represents a natural extension to the current Blender particle system.
• Excellent for some crazy fluid like particle FX´s .
• Represents one of the most versatile and flexible fluid simulator type.
• Does not depend on boundary conditions.

Cons:

Achieving the same level of accuracy as a grid based simulator like El’beem requires a high number of particles.

Todo

• Improving its speed and stability (particle KD-tree?)
• Jahka’s review and possible integration in his system?

(reviewing requires time, so don’t forget to support him and to mention this patch if you want to motivate him 😉 )

This new method is not a replacement for the Blender El´beem fluid simulator, it’s just a complement and a natural extention to the current particle system, like many other packages have implemented (Softimage, Houdini, Realflow, etc.)

I plan to release the patch for next week for further development and review, also the GUI is not finished and some design considerations should be made, this patch is nearly ready to go and it will not require any traumatic change in Blender so will be safe to commit.

Hope you like it

Farsthary