Hello everyone, this is my first time posting here so please be gentle.

I'm currently working on a project at my college where my main goal is to simulate the flow of water in a static three dimensional scene. Currently I haven't gotten very far and I'm still researching different methods to do this simulation. So far I have found 3 models to simulate by and I'm curious if there are more, or if these 3 are the ones available.

The methods and my thaughts about them:

Navier-Stokes equations - Seems to be the most accurate and complete form of simulation, but very costly to compute and above my current math knowledge. I'm thinking my option with this would be to find some open-source solver and using for the computation and optimizing it.

Lattice-Boltzmann - I've seen this mentioned and implemented in real time, but with very small scenes and I still haven't found any documentation how the method works..

Cellular automata - Seems like the fastest option, both by computational means and by means of understanding/implementing. But it seems difficult once you want it to excert more advanced behaviour like the coanda effect and turbulence.

So, there you have my thaughts. If you see some large errors in my reasoning or have some usefull links or facts for me I'd love to hear them.

Cheers in advance! /Daniel

1- Flow of water 2- Static 3d scene I would go for the Navier Stokes and http://www.opencfd.co.uk/openfoam/ The Lattice-Boltzmann is more complicated than the Navier's Not recommended I am not familiar with that third option of yours, you might find it of interest to put a link or two to some free material I have no comment on that third option Cheers and Good Luck

Here are some links regarding CA, I'll begin with one of the more known and basic forms of it and then a few links to fluid simulations with it.

Conway's Game of Life - http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Life.html A Simple water surface simulation - http://texturegarden.com/java/water/ A lot of examples of CA - http://cui.unige.ch/~chopard/CA/Anim.../img-root.html (The von-Karman street is very interesting in the above link)

Darn it, I forgot... Thanks for the feedback! =) /Cheers

Have you checked out the links in CFD-Wiki here:

http://www.cfd-online.com/Wiki/Movies_and_CG

I would not go with a Navier-Stokes based approach. It is too time consuming and you don't want to worry about convergence. Something like a cellular-automata approach sounds like a good idea, but I'm not at all familiar with those methods. Hopefully someone else can give you some advice. I have a friend who worked on a similar problem some time ago - developing methods to animate real-time blood-flows in virtual surgery simulators.

Daniel Interesting links, thanks a lot Jonas Open foam is already written and used by so many. If Daniel has the time and knowledge to modify it, that will be an addition to the code, this is what I understood from his posting. I did not recommend him to start from scratch and I would not recommend something that I do not even have its basics. Cheers to all and Good luck Daniel