Realistic is not necessarily the most convincing
April 24, 2024 12:04 PM Subscribe
Emil Dziewanowski is a technical artist in the gaming industry who excels at using inventive techniques to create compelling visual effects. His latest blog post, Flowfields, walks you through the process of animating the complex whorls and vortices of Jupiter without using traditional fluid dynamics, using lessons learned from such prior art as Contra's color-cycling, frame-by-frame animation, and the trippy lava effect in Quake, ultimately using a combination of clever tricks to design a "universal" flow simulator that can render appealing fluid effects in just half a millisecond.
This is adjacent to a lot of work I do, though I’m rarely directly involved beyond lending a hand at unfucking someone’s dodgy FluidNinja integration. The writeup is pretty solid, standard Unreal 4/early 5 implementation: RenderTarget ping-pong for a backbuffer, UCanvas material writes - I believe Epic’s trying to push all this to Runtime Virtual Textures. Some early work into the tooling for making fully volumetric turbulence/advection sim is finally coming online: ctrl+f “heterogeneous volumes” in the roadmap. That just debuted this week, so anyone can download latest and play with it for free (until your first million USD in Unreal-based income), if you’re interested.
If you just want to look at cool shit on ShaderToy, though, anything by cornusammonis is the best and purest of eye candy.
posted by Ryvar at 1:18 PM on April 24 [2 favorites]
If you just want to look at cool shit on ShaderToy, though, anything by cornusammonis is the best and purest of eye candy.
posted by Ryvar at 1:18 PM on April 24 [2 favorites]
An interesting real-world comparison is here: Voyager 1 Jupiter Cloud Timelapse Animation, which encompasses 16 "Jupiter days".
posted by flug at 2:21 PM on April 24
posted by flug at 2:21 PM on April 24
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posted by uncleozzy at 12:20 PM on April 24