Scale & Abstraction

As with every simulation of the world, a fundamental question we must answer is on which level of abstraction we are working on, for example, at which scale are we looking at the phenomenon? Kilometers? Meters? Millimeters? This defines how much liberty we can take in modelling our fluid. Zooming in on a bath tub filled with water and soap is much more difficult to simulate in a convincing way to the eye compared to seeing the earth from hundreds of thousands of kilometers away in space where we may only observe a mostly static blue little dot.

• Large Scale, Large Distance \(\rightarrow\) Nebula
• Large Scale, Medium Distance \(\rightarrow\) Clouds & Storms
• Large Scale, Small Distance \(\rightarrow\) Ocean Waves
• Small Scale, Medium Distance \(\rightarrow\) Rain
• Small Scale, Small Distance \(\rightarrow\) Surface Tension

How Games Fake Water

The idea of a "real-time fluid simulator" is a bit of an oxymoron and imagining highly realistic large scale fluid simulations inside games seams to be an outlandish idea for the vast majority of games.