The video is at http://vimeo.com/13457383 - you can get to this page by simply clicking the Vimeo logo on the embedded clip. From here, you can click on Thiago Costa's profile http://vimeo.com/thiagocosta/ and have a look at all of his 48 videos, and find a link to his website (which looks pretty interesting): http://thiagocosta.net/
The CrunchGear article doesn't really add anything, other than a layer of indirection.
Having said that, the video is awesome and thanks for sharing :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMsc48e41AQ (A Practical Simulation of Dispersed Bubble Flow)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyfB_vQHMAo (Physics-Inspired Topology Changes for Thin Fluid Features)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Who8EpbvCY (A Multiscale Approach to Mesh-based Surface Tension Flows)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHH8N_lNZzI (Rigid-Body Fracture Sound)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gx80u6hJT6o (Efficient Yarn-based Cloth with Adaptive Contact Linearization)
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~turk/bunny/bunny.html
It was preceded by the Utah Teapot. There's also the Cornell Box, for global illumination testing.
So, yeah, like Lena.
1) at ~23 seconds, look at the top-1/3, left-1/4 location. Chunks of particles literally spontaneously accelerate towards each other. Towards the top-most corner of the top platform, there's even a little snake-like thing that starts inch-worming around for no apparent reason, and a blob that leaps into the air at far higher velocity than it is made of.
2) with the 8-second cloth clip, note the twitching as the cloths try to find a stable resting point. Remind you of stacked objects in the Source engine[1], perhaps? Jump on top of them and it's like walking on an earthquake.
3) note how long the left block at ~2:40 takes to settle (almost, it doesn't actually), and the weird thrown-on-top chunk that twitches up and down a couple times, and then gets a burst of energy right when it starts fading out, moving up, and faster than the pieces it's touching, and without any visible ripple which could account for it.
If it's done by one person (Thiago Costa?), yes, very impressive job, that's a lot of work. But overall... more of the same.
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[1]: chosen only because it's a relatively modern engine, and one many are familiar with.
While impressive, it was developed using ICE - a rendering package addon for Softimage, and is probably not able to be calculated in anything remotely resembling real-time.
So no, you won't be able to tell what religion Kratos is unless it's during a cutscene.
That means that if can surely be used for 3D games as well.
It's a different problem domain. An effects system for movies will have tons of configurable knobs and parameters, allowing the artist to tweak it so it's exactly right for that shot. Some of these settings will produce interesting and gorgeous effects, but they're designed to allow maximum customizability. If the system has some artifacts in particular situations, they can easily be worked around by tuning some knobs, adjusting the camera angle, etc. Hell, you can even paint in 2d over the final output frame.
In a game, the effects have to look good from all angles and in all situations - many of which you don't know in advance. When I wrote a cloth simulation for a game, most of my time wasn't spend developing the core sim (which took all of an hour or two), but actually spent making sure the cloth behaved appropriately under all circumstances - even when the player would make sudden, exaggerated movements and animations (some of which weren't even physically possible).
Those real-time versions for modelling packages tend to be really rough approximations using the same code, and not worth the time it would take to optimize for a real, resource-restricted environment like a gaming console.
http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/water-sg02/
That said, if it is realtime, then yay.
To be fair it looked a little different than water.
EDIT: Ah, found it: http://www.alecrivers.com/physical/overview_physics.htm
There is even a older one that was an form-based application for windows where you could edit particles and connections. Pretty fun.
edit Your link reminds me of Phun http://www.phunland.com/wiki/Home
Vive le Montréal! Oh and kudos to Thiago Costa. This is just awesome!
There are always many more people that can add relatively low quality comments to a discussion, for instance by solely making a joke or recounting some personal connection to the OP. The quality of the average comment on HN is high, partly because the low quality kinds of comments are discouraged, so they don't drown out the high quality comments.
Even gaming consoles are limited by the number of polygons they can render, so the physics engine, if running in a game, wouldn't have to consider all the approximation points that were used to generate the high res renders at the start of the video for instance.
Teapotahedron, please. It's the sixth platonic solid.
I've seen the bunny and the happy buddha the most often.