Integrating Real-Time Fluid Simulation with a Voxel Engine
Johanne Zadick, Benjamin Kenwright, Kenny Mitchell · The Computer Games Journal · 2016
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.