Vortex

Vortex was a school project I worked on during the year 1997. The idea was to create a program we could use to generate fluid dynamics animations. The main algorithm used was first described by Nick Foster and Dimitri Metaxas in a paper called Realistic Animation Of Liquids.

Here are some features :

• Cross-platform : 3 programmers worked on this project, one of them on DEC Alpha, the second on PC with Windows, and the last one on PC with MS-DOS. The final version of Vortex perfectly worked on the three systems – and that year we learnt a lot about compatibility !
• Platform-independent UI : we recoded a complete event-driven window system, with custom buttons, sliders, and all the stuff we needed.
• Realtime rendering for the preview
• Raytracing for the final rendering
• Particle system, mixed with the fluid voxels
• Fractal generated terrains to create nice moutains and lakes
• Bump map support for cheap water effects

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