Video: Some Very Impressive Computer-Generated Falling Dirt and Flying Neckties

That is totally awesome! I can't wait to see what the next 10 years will bring, it's an exciting time!

whoa

I AM AMAZED

Oooh yeah! Video Games are gonna rock! But it needs about five more years lol

very cool. Some of it seems to behave alot like a fluid but its still amazingly good.

awsome , it will probably be very expensive and will be used in industries to model the behavior of materials during processing and material handling and build prototype systems. Any modeling you can do in a computer simulation saves you literally millions of dollars in this day and age .

Truely inspirational technology , if theres any faith heads left out there still wondering why we bother studying science or wonder what science really can tell us about reality , this type of advancement of human understanding is why .

to add to steve28's comment,

It can also be used in animation and cg graphics for both computer games and movies/animation. This looks to be who they're marketing to: artists.

It can possibly even crash/stress testing solids and CAD models in future releases.

It does still look like it still has some jello effects that need to be worked out. Overall AWESOME.

i just cant wait to see the blood splatter when i shoot a hooker in the next grand theft auto...

I hope they make the software compatible with all or most of the big 3D software...specifically Lightwave.

They didn't show any smoke or other similar effects...I'm sure this engine can do it, after all, all you need to do is change the settings and make the particles semi transparent/translucent.

Explosions and other things would probably look pretty realistic as well.

I wonder, if you paired this engine with Maxwell, if it'll take 6 years now to render a scene versus 3 years with just Maxwell alone. The particle calculations probably are done before rendering, but I'm still guessing it'll take a LONG time even with a Core i7 9-something Extreme Edition.

Having GPU acceleration support would also be awesome. That can half or quarter the render/calculation time on most scenes.

PS...the scenes in Spiderman 3, the ones with Sandman, would look TEN times better if it was redone with this engine to simulate all the sand and stuff.

After watching the video 4-5 times now...I've got a critique of the engine to make.

The water physics aren't as impressive as when I first saw it. All the water ran down down/sheeted off the object as if it were made of super slick glass. Specifically, look at the bunny as it gets hit with the water. None of the water sticks to the bunny the way it would in real life. I'm not a doctor of fluid dynamics or anything...just an artist with an eye for detail and that's something that stuck out like a sore thumb to me.

Most times, water will coat and leave a thin film that continues to flow until nothing but little droplets are left. Maybe you can dial up the complexity higher to simulate that...or maybe an artist can make up for it through some ingenious trick to simulate that separately...but I want to see more realistic behavior out of it from the get go.

Hmm I wonder how fast of a computer would be needed to do that in real time and more importantly how many console generations it takes to reach that level... yeeee

@rpenri this is sort of unrelated but when I momentarily searched for the computers they were using (I got distracted and gave up after a minute yay persistence) I saw another video from the guy that wasn't this engine but was smoke
http://www.vimeo.com/7627715 just in case that might interest you

P.S. - also it seems the guy does work on ads and movies and even some games (or trailers for them I dunno didn't look too hard haha) so its possible we've already seen examples of this engine in stuff... wait actually not this particular engine though this ones super new (durr that's why there's a popsci post about it hahaha) still chances are there will be some stuff in the near future although I'll doubt if I'll really even notice...

rpenri. I noticed the water after you mentioned it. Without knowing much about this program, it might be a human error in modeling rather than the ability of engine software.

can it recreate 9/11 models?

I bet RealFlow could do the same.

So can i hear anyone say Uncharted 3????!!!!!!!!

The future of gaming/CGI looks bright.

I'd like to see a physics engine that could incorporate compressible fluids while accounting for change in pressure/volume due to temperature change and simultaneously simulating heat flow for realistic wind & smoke... pretty demanding, I know. Of course, I'd also like to have lighting that could simulate the double-slit experiment. That would be great.

When this is accomplished, I want to play my video games off a supercomputing cloud streaming to my HDTV/computer/3D monitor, OnLive-style.

Any developers up to the task?

That's pretty cool.

I've often said any hard science can be taught by computer games. I would LOVE to see a K-12 self-paced curriculum where the student re-creates the original experiments that gave us the technology we have.

Imagine you've crash landed on an unknown planet and you need to develop the technology to get off. How do you determine the circumference of the planet? You need a shallow well, trigonometry, and an accurate clock. Design and "build" each, and run your experiment in a virtual environment modeled on the physical world. Re-use the same tools for later experiments.

Much later in the game you discover you're on Earth - 50,000 years in the past. Build knowledge from the bottom up; rather than memorizing useless facts (40,075 km.)

This simulation engine or something like it would be needed to conduct the experiments.

[Grad school: you then get stranded on small, very dense mining planet.]

the bunnies thrown against the wall was funny!

Some of those simulations had enough percieved randomness to be very believeable. Some day this kind of thing will go beyond mere video game graphics. In the not-too-distant future, entire movies could be produced that rival the real thing, down to the particle. Yet, I wonder if modeling the human form will ever get beyond the "uncanny valley".

Maybe this could be used to create fantastic tools for stress analysis and predictive behavior for things like plate tectonics, landslides, etc. Of course, any simulation is only as accurate as the detail of the data and variables.

that was one of the greatest things i've seen all week! i do 3D modeling and animation and it was so smooth... mind blasting if i may!