Hacker News Reader

Great, thanks for the reply.

I do hydrodynamic modelling at work but on much larger scales (hundreds of metres to tens of kilometres - with FVCOM (http://fvcom.smast.umassd.edu) in particular) and the turbulence is handled by sub grid scale parameterisations, like you say (in my case, the model used is GOTM: http://www.gotm.net). I wasn't sure if these renders were using the same techniques or were pretty animations which looked OK.

View on HN

Small world, I used to work for an industrial CFD company, and one of my tasks was estimating the computational effort required for a given simulation (which depended on the specific characteristics of our turbulence model). I was mostly doing compressible work, too, so my knowledge of hydrodynamic models used in cinema is not super detailed. I do know, however, that most cinema software uses particle based simulation for incompressible flow, which really is not a terrible approximation, but it probably would not be suitable for the kind of work you are doing!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com