12 Responses:

1. Eric H says:

   7 years ago at 3:54 pm

   Reminds me very much of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWEl8-PHhMI

2. Phil says:

   7 years ago at 4:18 pm

   Is this really going into xscreensaver?

   • jwz says:

     7 years ago at 4:34 pm

     Eagerly awaiting your patch.

     • nooj says:

       7 years ago at 7:22 pm

       Hmm, I wonder how hard this would be. It's "just" a particle fluid simulator. If you restricted to a certain subset of flows (say, the second one, with varying initial brick sizes and aquarium sizes and colors), the calculations could be optimized to run very quickly. You could do a lot of precomputation.

       • Matt Kenworthy says:

         7 years ago at 3:05 pm

         This animation led me down the Internet rabbit hole, wondering how to code an SPH simulator, and I ended up at this Obfuscated C Contest entry with SPH simulator, and also this tutorial on How to code up an SPH algorithm. That's my monday gone...

         • nooj says:

           7 years ago at 5:01 pm

           This is actually a great start. Round one could be a 2D simulation (as in the pdf you linked). Get that up and running in xscreensaver, and extending it to 3D is trivial and becomes a graphics problem (adding camera rotations), not a fluids problem. (Everyone writes their first simulator like this: they make a 2D version, then go back and change every 2 to 3 and add a third variable.)

           Remember, for world-class fluid simulators, you have to worry about things like stability and accuracy and mass loss and time integration, none of which you give a shit about in a toy. And don't worry about efficiency or speed either. Those problems go away if you restrict yourself to say, less than a million particles. Also, avoid fancy data structures.

           I bet you could have a simple example running by next Monday!

     • Phil says:

       7 years ago at 9:18 pm

       I actually downloaded the xscreensaver source, read the hacking README, and realized it is completely beyond my meager skills. I may see if I can trick the author into submitting a patch.

   • Jef Poskanzer says:

     7 years ago at 10:17 am

     What I'd really like for xscreensaver is a filter that turns any saver into lego.

3. Lionfire says:

   7 years ago at 10:47 pm

   I think my favourite part is that YouTube felt that what I really needed half way through the viewing was a big popup ad for blenders. Because the video was rendered in Blender.

   Keyword Analysis, 2016: still not quite there.

   • nooj says:

     7 years ago at 2:27 pm

     Do people not understand there are deliberate false positives, to keep ads from seeming too creepy? Previously

4. Lloyd says:

   7 years ago at 3:11 am

   This is rendered? It isn't tedious stopmotion?

   What a crock. I expect animators to work at their craft.

5. Jonathan says:

   7 years ago at 2:36 am

   This reminds me of a severely underrated computer game "Wetrix": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wetrix