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by pdkl95 4298 days ago
As cool as those are, I've always found Numb Res to be the most impressive:

http://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2011/05/03/numb-res/

( http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=56900 )

( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTOC_ajkRkU )

Subtle presentation a great effect, but this bit from the demo's nfo is kind of insane:

    3d smoothed particle hydrodynamics with a fully-featured solver,
    supporting surface tension, viscosity and collisions with arbitrary meshes. 

    rendering as metaballs converted to triangle meshes with marching cubes. 

    simulating around 250,000 - 1 million particles per frame and generating & rendering
    several million vertices per frame during triangulation. 

    except we wanted to do it in realtime. on a consumer gpu. on vanilla directx 9.
    no cuda/compute, no geometry shaders. (they'd probably be too slow anyway.)

    with everything else youd expect from a modern demo going on around it and on top.
    the best possible lighting, depth of field, post-process antialiasing.

    twice. (for stereoscopic 3d.)
    with style.
2 comments

The page also shows that sometimes what you think is hard is easy and what you overlook is the really difficult bit:

> The problem with SPH in realtime is it’s really really hard. The simple explanation of the algorithm is: “take all the particles near my particle and perform some force exchange between them”.

At this point I was expecting a long discussion on all the clever tricks they have found to calculate the force exchange between thousands of particles in a snap. And instead...

> The force exchange is easy; the “all the particles near my particle” is a bitch. On GPU it’s even more of a bitch; and in 3D it becomes an order of magnitude more of a bitch.

> [...]

> The problem is simply the neighbourhood search. You end up with a variable amount of fast-moving particles affecting each particle, where it’s hard to pick an upper bound – so the spatial database is hard to construct. If you solve the neighbourhood search, you can solve SPH.

I wish there was a HN thread to geek out about the demo scene. Was just watching some of the Mind Candy DVDs recently and going down memory lane.