Hi,

I'm working on c++ program that calculates fluid dynamics and now I have a
question in how to best render the smoke (just a first test, I'll develope
it to a more general fluid dynamics engine later on) on povray. The
simplest idea I was thinking is to use a union (or merge) of boxes that
each has the transparency that is proportional to the density of smoke in
the corresponding point in the calculation grid. And after that improve the
effects by using media in the boxes and so on.. But i guess there are better
ways of doing it and thought I'd ask =). The thing is that it'll be a lot of
boxes, of one calculates a grid that is 200x200x200 points one has to draw 8
000 000 boxes, although in reality I can shink that number in the output to
maybe 1 000 000 by not including the ones with a density = 0 (or close to
it)...

So what do you think?

You can se some output in 2d (the calculations I'm currently doing is in 3d)
from the program (and a small test program for win32) on my page at:

http://web.comhem.se/~u13140236/FD/FD.html

If you try the software, the buttons to remember (as it as of yet has no
documentation) are "W" to toggle wind, "S" to toggle smoke, and "A" to
toggle the flow lines (and one can also controll the windspeed by clicking
"up" and "down" arrows on the keyboard). I also think the version available
on the page does not have all the features that are shown in some of the
screenshots (like that the shades are smoothed between the point and so on,
but then maybe it has ;). I can't test it right now as I'm in my linux
enviroment right now)

Regards
/Jani

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