Nvidia, the American technology company who specialise in computer graphics and effects, have revealed what they believe to be an innovative development that could enhance many games and CGI moments in film.
While noticing the effects of water in film or video game content is usually not seen unless it appears right in front of you (as a ‘splash effect’) or is exceptionally poor, the new system from Nvidia will aim to only have itself noticed for its realism, as its latest enhancement to the technology was recently demonstrated in behind-the-scenes video form.
The ‘tech demos’ for ‘Position Based Fluids’ are officially described as a ‘liquid simulation algorithm’, and is designed to be able to help games developers and any other clientele to create even more ‘realistic water-based effects’.
Nvidia representatives Miles Macklin and Matthias Müller-Fischer, who are credited on the video demonstrations, stated of its development: “In fluid simulation, enforcing incompressibility is crucial for realism; it is also computationally expensive. By formulating and solving a set of positional constraints that enforce constant density, our method allows similar incompressibility and convergence to modern smoothed particle hydrodynamic (SPH) solvers, but inherits the stability of the geometric, position-based dynamics method, allowing large time steps suitable for real-time applications.”
The system appears to operate by implementing the water as thousands of ‘particles’ which utilise the correct physics with each other’s movement and its surroundings, with the correct visual representation later replacing the ‘ballpit’. The demonstration of this technique in two videos can be seen below, one of which will be of particular interest . Also featured is a water-based scene from one of last year’s biggest video games, for a chance to compare with the latest developments.
Following on from recent announcements of a new version for their PhysX ‘real-time environmental destruction effects’, a theoretical combination of the two would not look out of place in any disaster movie based around flooding, but with video games the more familiar territory for Nvidia (to the extent that they are planning their own future console ‘Project Shield’), will the high-quality effects of such titles be further recognised if the technology is implemented?
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