Fluid Simulator

Position Based Fluids simulation and surface reconstruction for the CS284A final project.

Highlights

• Position Based Fluids (PBF) solver with an interactive OpenGL/NanoGUI viewer.
• Optional CUDA path for faster simulation and large particle counts.
• Marching cubes surface extraction for mesh reconstruction.
• Headless mode with particle cache output for offline rendering.

Project resources

• Project website
• Final report (PDF)
• Final video
• Slides

Build

Quick start (see docs/BUILDING.md for details):

1. Initialize submodules: git submodule update --init --recursive
2. Configure and build: mkdir build && cd build cmake .. cmake --build . --config Release

CUDA build (optional): cmake -DBUILD_CUDA=ON -DCMAKE_CUDA_FLAGS="-arch=sm_60" ..

Requirements:

• CMake 3.9+
• C++17 toolchain
• OpenGL
• CUDA 10.2 (optional, for fluidsimCuda)

Run

Executables are placed in the repo root after building.

CPU viewer: ./fluidsim -f scene/fluid.json

Headless CPU run with particle cache output: ./fluidsim -n -s 5 -p output/frames -f scene/fluid_large.json

CUDA run (headless): ./fluidsimCuda -s 5 -p output/frames -f scene/fluid_large.json

Common options for fluidsim:

• -f <path> scene JSON (see scene/)
• -r <path> project root (must contain shaders/Default.vert)
• -a <int> sphere latitude segments
• -o <int> sphere longitude segments
• -p <path> output particle folder
• -i <path> input particle folder (replay)
• -n disable window (headless)
• -s <int> duration in seconds (headless mode)

Options for fluidsimCuda:

• -f <path> scene JSON
• -r <path> project root
• -p <path> output particle folder
• -s <int> duration in seconds

Note: the CUDA path currently supports plane collisions only.

Scenes and data

Scene configurations live in scene/ (for example scene/fluid.json, scene/fluid_million.json). Use -f to switch between them.

More docs

• docs/BUILDING.md for build notes
• docs/PROPOSAL.md, docs/MILESTONE.md, docs/FINAL.md for project writeups