> "Tim Nikias v2.0" wrote
> I think it looks awesome! Is it all POV-SDL, or some external program? How
> long was the parsing time for the frames? Rendering times?

I've wrote and external program responsible for the physical simulation of the
liquid. Every time step (user defined) it saves in a file the surface of the liquid
in mesh2 format (around 12000 vertex and 22000 triangles for the simulation
posted). All those file are then processed by PovRay for final rendering
(Pov is used only for that purpose). Rendering times are a problem, though:
8 min / frame with radiosity and photons on (~360 frames in the animation
you've seen). Maybe an advanced user could optimize
some parameters and speed up rendering without a loss in quality... :)

> I'm not so much
> interested into the inner workings (they're sure interesting, but I don't
> have the time right now to wrap my head around that) but more how easy it
> could be used by some average guy? Like, do I need to build my scene with an
> isosurface, or can I just hand a POV-object to the program? How about
> setting up frames/steps?

Right now the program is not user-friendly (well, I was in a hurry to complete
my thesis so I postponed that aspect...). It provides a graphical interface
for preview purposes only but you have to setup your scene through a text
file whose sections define:
-) external time step - frame save time.
-) particles number
-) initial position of fluid blocks (if any).
-) fluid emitters (if any - with start / end time).
-) boundary definition (just planes for the moment)
-) ...
Just a word: boring : (

Once started the simulation you only have to wait (a lot... : P): 100 secs / frame
for that animation (~100000 fluid particles). Computational time and memory
requirements increase quickly raising the number of particles involved.
The program advance internally by a time step that respect stability conditions
(for example, if the average inner step is 0.0001250s (realistic value), the
program have to update the simulation ~160 times from a frame to another,
if the user defined a 0.02s external time step).

I'm working on a user-friendly editor in my spare time (not that much), so who
knows... :)

Claudio

Ps: I've uploaded another animation (ogl preview of a different simulation).

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