[In this technical article originally printed in Game Developer magazine, Neversoft co-founder Mick West looks at how to efficiently implement fluid effects - from smoke to water and beyond - in video games, with example code.]

Fluid effects, such as rising smoke and turbulent water flow, are everywhere in nature but are seldom implemented convincingly in computer games. The simulation of fluids (which covers both liquids and gases) is computationally very expensive.

It's also mentally expensive, with even introductory papers on the subject relying on the reader to have math skills at least at the undergraduate calculus level.

In this two-part article, I will attempt to address both these problems from the perspective of a game programmer who's not necessarily conversant with vector calculus. I'll explain how certain fluid effects work without using advanced equations and without too much new terminology.

I'll also describe one way of implementing the simulation of fluids in an efficient manner without the expensive iterative diffusion and projection steps found in other implementations.

A working demonstration in ZIP form with source code accompanies this article; example output from this can be seen in Figure 1.

FIGURE 1 Smoke output is shown from the accompanying code.

Grids and Particles

There are several ways of simulating the motion of fluids, but they all generally divide into two common styles: grid methods and particle methods. In a grid method, the fluid is represented by dividing up the space a fluid might occupy into individual cells and storing how much of the fluid is in each cell.

In a particle method, the fluid is modeled as a large number of particles that move around and react to collisions with the environment, interacting with nearby particles. Let's focus first on simulating fluids with grids.

The simplest way to discuss the grid method is in respect to a regular two-dimensional grid, although the techniques apply equally well in three dimensions. At the most basic level, to simulate fluid in the space covered by a grid you need two grids: one to store the density of liquid or gas at each point and another to store the velocity of the fluid.

Figure 2 shows a representation of this, with each point having a velocity vector and containing a density value (not shown). The actual implementation of these grids in C/C++ is most efficiently done as one-dimensional arrays. The amount of fluid in each cell is represented as a float.

The velocity grid (also referred to as a velocity field, or vector field) could be represented as an array of 2D vectors, but for coding simplicity it's best represented as two separate arrays of floats, one for X and one for Y.

FIGURE 2 The fluid density moves over a field of velocities, with a density stored at each point.

In addition to these two grids, we can have any number of other matching grids that store various attributes. Again, each will be stored as a matching array of floats, which can store factors such as the temperature of the fluid at each point or the color of the fluid (whereby you can mix multiple fluids together).

You can also store more esoteric quantities such as humidity, for example, if you were simulating steam or cloud formation.