"faux" Fluid Stream
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Does anyone have any great ideas for generating a fake fluid stream for simulation of flow. I think the answer exists in the "emitter". I am trying to bridge
the world between teaching students about kinematics and bernoulli's equations at the same time you all are providing them the tools to actually visualize it. Somewhere there is a nexus between Phun physics and sketchy physics that is going to really change how kids/adults learn.This forum keeps me constantly engaged...you all are incredible!
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Except for the buoyancy plane (which isnt fluid at all) I dont really think fluid is possible with the current version. Maybe lots and lots of spheres.
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lots of spheres doesnt work very well, in my experience. You cant get enough spheres to get a decent resolution for your 'fluid.'
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Yesturday I tried making hundreds of shapes, with slight repulsion of one another, kinda like particles in a fluid. From what I could see, it sort of worked... but it's insanely laggy, and still needed about 10X as many particles
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Are you using a single-polygon component? If you set it to always face camera, will it always face camera during a sim?
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I think the main flaw in my idea is it works as particles at a molecular level, you'd never be able to make it with a high enough resolution for fluid. The particles just push up against the container, with a relatively thin area in the center.
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Well, I don't think anyone simulates with a realistic number of molecules. The least realistic fluid animations use a particle emitter, where the particles use a 'blobby' algorithm to simulate a fluid surface. A single particle looks like a polygon-sphere, a droplet. A tight line of particles looks almost like a true fluid stream. The major downfall is that the particles don't have any expression of 'surface tension' or volume, so they freely scatter and also can flow to a single small spot. Scriptable particles have partially overcome even that drawback, if you can script in a kind of attraction that has a min. standoff distance, and still incorporates friction between objects, damping, and so on.
True fluid simulators that do all the work internally still operate on a mesh that you produce which has a relatively small number of vertices. Just like Finite Element Analysis (FEA) used to simulate the failure of a given part design that uses a given material, such as acrylic plastic or a certain aluminum alloy. The part model, usually created in software like Solidworks, is broken up into elements, small blocks, so that the part looks like it is made of tiles, like the space shuttle. (It also has a resemblance to a quad-only polygonal model where all the quads are the same square area.) But the tiles are blocks, and the entire solid has been 'blockified'. Then the expected 'force' is applied to the part in a specified vector, and based on the material selected, an analysis is performed and a report is produced that details the amount of force that produces deflection and ultimately failure of the part. Usually an image is generated that shows which areas of the part are stressed the most, allowing the designer to rework it to improve his design.
The point is that these sims usually work on mere hundreds of elements, maybe several thousand at the most, not tens of thousands, and certainly not millions. You might be able to make something that looks like flowing sand or wheat, or maybe even 'like' a fluid, if some more advanced physics scripting is added. But since SU doesn't do any special rendering, the best is could probably look like is 'watery particles'.
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