I'd like to public some experiment with physx fluids, it is custom ice node which wraps sph fluids.
contains samples, installation guide and workgroup. There are no docs or toolbars, all workflow similar to usual particle simulation except solver, you need just to replace "Simulate Particles" with the "PhysX Simulate Fluid" compound. Builded and tested under 2012 sp1, win x64 only. CUDA card ( hi-end fermi is preferable ) required. Also, maybe you will need to install this
-if you get red "particle GPU creation failed" try to decrease max particles number parameter or drop down Radeon from your system and buy Nvidia
this attribute allocates ( once ) memory in GPU ram at the beginning of evaluation, so it is great tool to detect how many particles you can use with your videocard
- Max Speed attribute - this has VERY critical influence on the overall performance, set it as low as possible
- Approximate Fluid Box - rough bounding box in which your simulation happens ( big values slow down speed, low values leads to bad case when particles tops to collide with obstacles )
- Statical obstacles are implemented as triangle ( actual shape in bullet-terms ) mesh, they load once at the beginning of evaluation and cannot be changed during this eval
- Dynamical obstacle implemented as convex ( only at this time, I think it is possible to get it as triangle meshes in future ) and node check this port at each frame. when variable topo = false - only SRT of obstacle are traced by the solver, if true - all topology changes ( include simple points movement ) are mirrored in the Px world
- if it is possible - do all your sims near center of the world ( 0\0\0 ) and at normal scales ( in comparison to home grid size )
I did some test on GTX 480 ( 1.5 GB ), and at this time it is possible to run about 2M particles, which allocates about 0.9M videoRAM. CPU mode is also very fast.
So have a fun with the incredible fast water