Gamer’s tend to forget the reasons why they play video games. Some people play for the emotional attachment to the characters they like, while others simply play to shoot things and watch them go boom. I on the other hand play video games for the amazing worlds you can get lost in.
But every games has it’s issues when it comes to the environment, usually its getting the water to not only look like water. But also move realistically when something interacts with it. Today though, it seems that will be a thing of the past thanks to a new algorithm called PhysX’s Position Based Fluids (PBF) created over at Nvidia.
This new form of water based PhysX comes from the same Position Based Dynamics (PBD) that’s used for simulating realistic cloth and deformations in games worlds like Borderlands 2 and Batman:Arkham Asylum. Check out the video below to see the water in action.
Physics Based Dynamics uses an iterative solver that allows it to “maintain in-compressibility more efficiently than traditional SPH fluid solvers. It also has an artificial pressure term which improves particle distribution and creates nice surface tension-like effects (note the filaments in the splashes). Finally, vorticity confinement is used to allow the user to inject energy back to the fluid.”
For a full breakdown of how this new form of PhysX works, check out the SIGGRAPH 2013 paper by Miles Macklin and Matthias Mueller-Fischer.
