Real-time fluid simulation techniques

Question

What techniques are used for the real-time simulation of fluids such as water, for example in videogames?

In particular, I am looking for a project-idea for an (unfortunately rather short) physics project at Uni, so the simpler the better (if there is any such thing as "simple" in fluid-simulations...)

Answer 1

AFAIK the most popular method to simulate fluids in real-time is the SPH method:

• Smoothed-particle hydrodynamics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It's implemented in Bullet, PhysX, and Fluids:

Fluids v.3 is a large-scale, open source fluid simulator for the CPU and GPU using the smooth particle hydrodynamics method. Fluids is capable of efficiently simulating up to 8 million particles on the GPU (on 1500 MB of ram).

Some other helpful sources:

• GPU Gems - Chapter 38. Fast Fluid Dynamics Simulation on the GPU
• Open source 3D SPH solver - Math and Physics - GameDev.net
• SPHYSICS Home Page - SPHYSICS