Vorticle Fluids implemented in PopcornFX
This is a really crude first approximation of a homebrew realtime fluid simulation using vorticles. The general idea is a sparse layer of particles are queried for position and orientation and used as centers of rotation to simulate turbulent fluids. Even this very simple first experiment is very promising.
No noises, fields or turbulence forces are used, the motion is all directly a result of particles interacting with a layer of vorticles, which I reveal in the latter portion of this video.
Simulation is entirely on the CPU and takes 18ms per frame for 21,000 particles. One nice thing about vorticle simulations is the motion does not change with the number of particles, meaning a simulation can be tuned while running very fast and then the simulation turned up for millions of particles to be rendered in After Effects etc. I look forward to seeing how fast this will run when entirely on the GPU.
Apologies for the tiny video… this is just a screen capture.