Modern video games employ a variety of sophisticated algorithms to produce groundbreaking 3D rendering of water, which are pushing the visual boundaries and interactive experience of rich virtual environments. However, simulation and rendering of a large number of water particles is very time consuming and it is very hard to achieve real-time frame rate (due to the huge computational cost required), e.g., those found in feature movies and offline products [Flip Fluids2022], or tools (e.g., Houdini and Blender). That is why most water visual effects in modern games are either simulated as only a 2D shallow-water in which simulation is calculated in 2D grid and projected onto the heightfield, as in [Fluid Flux 2022], or are baked at preprocessing stage which does not allow the player to dynamically interact with the liquid at runtime, as a result, lots of the fun of interactivity is lost.

This course will discuss the state-of-the-art and production-proven techniques involved in building a real-time system on GPUs for simulation and rendering of realistic 3D liquid with millions of particles. It also discusses how to integrate the system into modern game engines (like UE5), with some show-cases of real applications in gaming environments.