Integrating real-time fluid simulation with a voxel engine

Zadick, Johanne; Kenwright, Benjamin; Mitchell, Kenny

Abstract

We present a method of adding sophisticated physical simulations to voxel-based games such as the hugely popular Minecraft (2012. http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Liquid), thus providing a dynamic and realistic fluid simulation in a voxel environment. An assessment of existing simulators and voxel engines is investigated, and an efficient real-time method to integrate optimized fluid simulations with voxel-based rasterisation on graphics hardware is demonstrated. We compare graphics processing unit (GPU) computer processing for a well-known incompressible fluid advection method with recent results on geometry shader-based voxel rendering. The rendering of visibility-culled voxels from fluid simulation results stored intermediately in CPU memory is compared with a novel, entirely GPU-resident algorithm.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jul 2, 2016
• Online Publication Date: Jul 29, 2016
• Publication Date: 2016-09
• Deposit Date: Jul 7, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 6, 2016
• Journal: The Computer Games Journal
• Electronic ISSN: 2052-773X
• Publisher: BMC
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 5
• Issue: 1-2
• Pages: 55-64
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40869-016-0020-5
• Keywords: Voxels, fluid, geometry shader, real-time, video games, graphical processing unit, GPU
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/id/eprint/10413
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s40869-016-0020-5
• Contract Date: Sep 6, 2016