Feedback.....

Just to let anyone know that may care. I'm still waiting for feedback on the current state of the plugin before I update to the new version.

Also a few comments on what people get wrong.

• Yes you do need to divide the meshes up finely. But not that fine. As long as each vertex is about a particle size away your fine. I have seen some meshes with 10k+ vertex's. Thats too fine unless particle size is smaller that .001
• Normals pointing in the wrong direction. It seems that there are few issues with normals. Use approximated polygon objects, convert to triangle mesh and then set smooth shading.
  
• You need a lot of particles to get a "good" fluid. 10,000 is not a lot. Rendering time still dominate in my experience.
  
• Time steps are too large. If the fluid just disappears, its because the simulation blew up.

So unless i get comments to the contrary I will work on the following.

1. Remove the need for subdivided meshes. This should fix the normal problems too. This is however quite a bit of code.
   
2. Some small adjustments to the GUI, but they won't be big. Yet.
3. Try to get some adaptive time steps in there. This will be a experimental feature.
   

Please keep the feedback coming.

Beta 0.6

The servers are still down and could be for a while. But i found a good file sharing site mediafire. It works on all the browsers i tried (Ok it didn't work with lynx) and didn't swamp me with popups. Nik is going to also host the main jar as well (Thanks). Watch out for his link latter.

So there are big changes with the beta 0.6. Most are behind the scenes to get everything ready for other physics and particle work. Rigid body and softbodys should not be that far away, and including them with this makes fluid interaction much easier. Also gases and fluid driven Materials and textures (for the procedural texture/material editor) will also be not too far away.

But for the current uses heres the bugs that will impact you the most:

1. Found and fixed a bug in the find neighbors code. Now you can use larger time steps and not blow up.
   
2. Found and fixed a density calculation bug when the spacing parameter is smaller than about 1.2. Now any spacing parameter less than 2 can be specified.
3. Some bugs in the thread code that lead to things being done twice on dual core machines was fixed.
4. XSPH bugs were fixed and is now exposed to users.
5. Many more i can't remember.

Some things that I have not yet fixed:

1. The flash/flicker that some have seen in rendering is almost defiantly a thread issue. Where it renders a next frame before the data for that frame is loaded properly.
2. It is still difficult to get a "smooth" surface to the fluid. This may require a lot of work to fix properly. Some surface tracking methods are more complicated that the fluid simulation. We will see how it pans out.

The big things added:

1. Mesh previewer. Its is however slow and not that accurate for the resolution. Its not adaptive and will scale with the bounding box. Also you might want to turn it off when you render a ray traced movie.
   
2. Sampled Grid to speed up ray tracing. On very simple scenes on the dual core machine at home there is almost no improvement. But when AA or extra lights are added this starts to change quickly. At work on a slower single core machine its about 2x faster with java 1.6 and about 5x faster with java 1.5. Note that you get very weird results if Sample Grid factor is too small. 4 or larger are fine. Too large and you spend a lot of time building the sampled grid. Note this does not use a tree so the grid build time scales with the volume of fluid. This should make it fast enough to render transparent fluids.
   
3. Improved GUI for object management. Again its not finished, but its easier to use both for a user and a coder.
   

Unfortunately this has added a issue or two:

• Sometimes a when you load a file and raytrace it there is no fluid. I can't locate the bug yet but a workaround is to turn on the sampled grid (under preview/view tab) render and then turn it off again. Preview renders seem to give you a good idea of whats going on.
• What little documentation there was is now largely wrong. There is no other documentation at this stage.
• The mesh preview will rarely have a large missing strip on it. The fix is to either move the physics object very very slightly (The fluid won't move because its in world coordinates) or add a small about to the mesh size under the preview/view panel to not be a whole fraction or multiple of the particle size. ie mesh size = 0.050001.
  
• Previous save files will not load properly with this version. However AoI is robust and will load everything else and you will just need to delete the not loaded physics and add a new one and configure and save.

Quite a long list here. I will try to now just comment of a few catches when using the plugin.

1. When you change parameters like particles size. You must reset the simulation and rebake. If you don't the simulation can blow up no matter how small the step size. Generally if in doubt rebake.
2. If you bake a simulation but did not save the parameters set, then when loaded from a save file everything can be inconstant eg. particle size, and hence raytraces and meshes will be wrong.
3. Use lots of particles for realistic effects and use a high density threshold for emitters. The advanced option of spacing can be reduced, but will increase simulation time.
   
4. ensure that all boundary and emitter meshes are subdivied enough and that the smoothing method is set to shading.
5. If you try XSPH reduce the step size.
   

So where are the files:
Here
The plugin is the Physics.jar file.
Everything will move to the server I was using before when its back online. And don't forget. Its still a beta.