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The folks at NextLimit have released a set of videos showcasing the new fluid solver available in RealFlow 2013.  The new solver, called Hybrido 2, has been built from-scratch in the new version for speed and detail, and the videos show the amazing stuff you can do.

“For those of you interested, the new solver is an implicit solver, as opposite to the current one which is an explicit solver. Implicit solver means that just only a few simulation steps per frame are needed, and this means, of course, faster simulations. It means also that “bounciness” is totally removed. The current solver needs many many simulation steps if you want to remove ‘bounciness’, and even doing it you can’t remove it completely.”

via RealFlow 2013: Watch preview videos online now | 3D World.

Graphics, Science cfd, realflow

Computational fluid dynamics is one of the oldest areas of computer simulation, and probably one of the most commonly requested features of most VFX projects.  Not only for fluids, but now also for fire, smoke, and more, it’s an area with lots of well-developed software products but frequently with little understanding of what actually is going on under the hood.  FXGuide has a nice starter article on the field of CFD, and some of the big names in VFX fluid simulation.

One of the most significant and commonly requested areas of real world simulation is fluid simulation. From pouring shots to ocean vistas, directors and artists have come to rely on computer simulated water and similar fluids.  Fluid dynamics is a complex area and fluid simulations are notoriously computationally expensive, yet when they work they can provide magnificent production value and breathtaking visual effects.

via The Science of Fluid Sims | fxguide.

Graphics, Science cfd, vfx

Two big announcements from the old mainstay of graphics came out this week.  SGI announced their latest quarterly earnings, showing a nice growth in revenue, but also a surprising amount of expenses for a company locked in R&D spending.

For the full fiscal 2011 year, SGI’s revenues came to $629.6m, up 56 per cent, and the company shrank its net loss to $21.2m, which worked out to a loss of 69 cents per share. By comparison, in fiscal 2010, SGI had lost $88.9m, or $2.92 per share.

But that’s not all:  In a surprising move to the CFD community, SGI helped themselves to a nice handful of popular open-source CFD simulation package OpenCFD.  OpenCFD has been around for 1970, actively developed and the latest version OpenFoam 2.0.1 just came out a few weeks ago.  Now SGI owns it and plans to better integrate it into their own software stack:

CFD is a big sales driver for SGI, and the idea that CEO Mark Barrenechea has for OpenFoam is not all that different from the idea that his old boss, Larry Ellison, had when Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems in January 2010. Barrenechea said that SGI would provide “the market’s first fully integrated CFD solution, where all the hardware and software work together”. That sure sounds like an Oracle “hardware-software-complete” sales pitch.

While much of SGI’s business recently has been pretty new territory, this move is classic SGI.  SGI has a long history of “integrating” Software stacks into their own products, from old Irix and SGIMPI libraries to special load balancing and performance analysis packages.  Added a simulation package to the mix is just the next logical step, and could prove a huge boon to their bottom line.

Let’s just hope it doesn’t turn out like Alias, Cray, or Intergraph..

via SGI (almost) doubles sales, (almost) halves losses • The Register.

Science cfd, sgi

Tecplot has a great case-study from Continuum Dynamics about their use of Tecplot360 to create a ship air-wake database to be used in helping Helicopters landing on ships.  Using TecPlot not only for its CFD capabilities but it’s visualization support as well, they have a few great paragraphs towards the bottom about their analysis procedures.

Tecplot 360 allowed CDI to graphically render the data for better analysis, as well as to check and double-check data, especially for previously-undetectable data. For example, CDI uses Tecplot 360 to measure tip vortices, rendered visually as an intertwined blue helix.

“I could extract data for each one of those vortices, such as the distance beneath the rotor, so I could compare it to experimental data,” said Whitehouse. “You can also see the vortex pairing, which was not something that had been predicted with CFD for a hovering helicopter before this point. You start to see new physics that have been observed experimentally, but that people maybe have had difficulty predicting.”

via Case Study: Continuum-Dynamics, Inc. Uses Tecplot 360 to Develop First Commercial Ship Air Wake Database for U.S. Navy Helicopter Flight Simulators.

Science case study, cfd, tecplot

Exotic Matter has just released an impressive new CFD simulation and animation tool named ‘Naiad’ that offers not only a plugin interface, but a complete front-end package and software API.

Naiad is more than just a software package, it is:

• a description of a simulation expressed as a graph: the Naiad Graph
• an interface specification used to construct a Naiad Graph: the Naiad Interface
• a plug-in API allowing users to write custom nodes in the Naiad Graph
• a software package which conforms to the Naiad Interface and runs the simulation described by a Naiad Graph
• an open-source software package allowing an artist to interactively construct a Naiad Graph using a 3D GUI front-end
• a standard file-format for storing the results of a Naiad simulation, called the EMP format.

via Naiad – Overview.

Graphics, Science cfd, exotic matter, naiad, software

Just got an email about this beautiful visualization of water flow around a Los Angeles class submarine, generated from data from SAIC’s NFA code.

A 688 submarine traveling on the surface of the ocean is shown. The simulation was performed on a Cray XE6 supercomputer using 6,144 processors. The simulation ran for 19,000 time steps and completed in 36 hours.

This was run on one of the new HPCMP Cray’s, showing just what you can do with 6,000 cores processors at your disposal.

Disclaimer: I work at the site where this Simulation & Visualization was done, although I was not involved.

via YouTube – 3.2 billion-cell simulation calculated using NFA CFD code.

Science cfd, visualization

NextLimit may have a competitor to their popular RealFlow CFD package coming up soon in the form of a new tool called Slipstream FX from canadian company Exocortex.  They use an automatic adaptive tetrahedral mesh and claim that their simulation algorithms, while currently only marketed to the movie industry, are suitable for use in real-world engineering problems (after some rigorous validation testing, of course).

Normal CFD meshes must be aligned with fluid boundaries and flow fields to produce accurate results. This technique requires much fussing by the analyst to get the mesh right. When the flow-field changes, as it does unsteady flows, analysts must revise or recreate the CFD mesh.

Exocortex’s approach enables the tetrahedral mesh to be quickly and automatically refined and redefined in regions where the flow velocity changes rapidly. Consequently, the software is able to model complex phenomena such as breaking waves and water sloshing in a tank.

The rapid refinement is made possible by dividing the mesh-generation and CFD solution among multiple processors.

via VEKTORRUM » Exocortex Debuts Adaptive Multi-Core Fluid Analysis.

Science cfd, simulation

A master’s thesis by Øystein Krog integrates into the open-source Ogre3d system to provide CUDA-accelerated smoothed particle hydrodynamics.

This work is part of my masters thesis in Computer Science at NTNU (Norwegian University of Science and Technology).
I have created a SPH library that uses the power of the GPU (through CUDA) to simulate fluids with extremely high performance (“real-time”).
In addition I have created a small demo application that uses Ogre to render the simulation interactively.
The application (and library) supports simple “wall” boundaries as well as “terrain” boundaries. The terrain is rendered using Ogre’s excellent new terrain component.

The results are impressive, and I almost swear I saw this at the SIGGRAPH Real-Time theater.  If not, then something very similar.  The ability to simulate thousands of particles in real-time is one of those very GPGPU-like problems.

The demo at SIGGRAPH first simulated the particles, then used a multi-pass rendering technique to make the result looks like real semitranslucent water.

gpusphsim – Project Hosting on Google Code. via Ogre3d Forums

Science cfd, gpgpu, simulation

NextLimit has just released RealFlow5 into the world, boasting the new REnderKit and Hybrido solver.  Hybrido brings RealFlow from simulating small water effects into simulating large bodies of water complete with splashes, foam, and mist.  Already in use by several major films like Avatar and District 9, this new version is guaranteed to be a big hit.

RealFlow 5 continues in this tradition of innovation, introducing Hybrido, the revolutionary new hybrid technology, making RealFlow the only product on the market which enables the user to simulate large bodies of water with sophisticated secondary effects, like splashes, foam and mist.  And, due to its cutting-edge body dynamics solver, Caronte, RealFlow 5 also offers unmatched capabilities for large-scale, complex simulations.

RealFlow is available for $3995 for new licenses, and $1995 for upgrades.  Full pricing is available on their website.

RealFlow :: Fluids & Dynamics Simulation Tool.

Graphics, Science cfd, next, realflow, software

Last month, the US bobsled team, “Team Night Train” won the 2010 World Cup Championship – the first time a US team has won that title in 17 years.  While much credit goes to the sledders, PCWorld has some sample imagse from the designers of the sled who used cutting-edge computational fluid dynamics simulations and visualizations to design the winning sled.

In this image, the PowerFlow software shows sled designers a computer-generated visualization of complex, turbulent airflow that travels over the centerline of the sled and the four-man crew on a run. The designers with the Bo-Dyn Bobsled Project, which built Night Train’s sled, can then change the design based on the simulations and make adjustments on the fly–much faster than before–to help cut turbulence and make the sled slip through the air more quickly.

See more pictures in the slideshow on their site.

via To Build a Better Bobsled – PCWorld.

Science bobsled, cfd, sports