121–130 of 174 posts
Does anyone have any recommendations for a former math major turned SWE to get into CFD simulations? I find this material fascinating but it's been a while since I've done any vector calculus or PDEs so my math is very rusty.
As a person who did a PhD in CFD, I must admit I never encountered the vorticity confinement method and curl-noise turbulence. I guess you learn something new every day! Also, in industrial CFD, where the Reynolds numbers are higher you'd never want something like counteracting artificial dissipation of the numerical method by trying to applying noise. In fact, quite often people want artificial dissipation to stabil…
Maybe you're not the right person to ask, but I'll go anyway: I would like to learn the basics of CFD not because I expect to do much CFD in life, but because I believe the stuff I would have to learn in order to be able to understand CFD are very useful in other domains. The problem is my analysis is very weak. My knowledge about linear algebra, differential equations, numerical methods, and so on is approximately l…
https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/9780750665940/numerical-c...
Or, via an amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Numerical-Computation-Internal-Extern...
https://matthias-research.github.io/pages/tenMinutePhysics/i...
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This was the big realization for me when I got into graphics - everything on the screen is a lie, and the gestalt is an even bigger lie. It feels similar to how I would imagine it feels to be a well-informed illusionist - the fun isn’t spoiled for me when seeing how the sausage is made - I just appreciate it on more levels.
At some point every render-engine builder goes through the exercise of imagining purely physically-modeled photonic simulation. How soon one gives up on this computationally intractable task with limited marginal return on investment is a signifier of wisdom/exhaustion. And, yes, I've gone way too far down this road in the past.
Till then, I have some hope, that native support for raytracing on the GPU will allow for more possibilities ..
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This was the big realization for me when I got into graphics - everything on the screen is a lie, and the gestalt is an even bigger lie. It feels similar to how I would imagine it feels to be a well-informed illusionist - the fun isn’t spoiled for me when seeing how the sausage is made - I just appreciate it on more levels.
At some point every render-engine builder goes through the exercise of imagining purely physically-modeled photonic simulation. How soon one gives up on this computationally intractable task with limited marginal return on investment is a signifier of wisdom/exhaustion. And, yes, I've gone way too far down this road in the past.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not being a graphics person, is this what hardware ray tracing is, or is that something different?
Rayteacing doesn't simulate light, it simulates a very primitive idea of light. There's no diffraction, no interference patterns. You can't simulate the double-slit experiment in a game engine, unless you explicitly program it. Our universe has a surprising amount of detail. We can't even simulate the simplest molecular interactions fully. Even a collision of two hydrogen atoms is too hard - time resolution and space…
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> It looks like the GPU is doing most of the work Yes. The GPU is doing most of the work in a lot of modern games. It isn't great at everything though, and there are limitations due to its architecture being structured almost solely for the purpose of computing massively parallel instructions. > when do we start to wonder if the GPU can “offload” anything to the whole computer that is hanging off of it The main bottl…
This is somewhat reassuring. A decade ago when clock frequencies had stopped increasing and core count started to increase I predicted that the future was massively multicore. Then the core count stopped increasing too -- except only if you look in the wrong place! It has in CPUs, but they moved to GPUs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not being a graphics person, is this what hardware ray tracing is, or is that something different?
Rayteacing doesn't simulate light, it simulates a very primitive idea of light. There's no diffraction, no interference patterns. You can't simulate the double-slit experiment in a game engine, unless you explicitly program it. Our universe has a surprising amount of detail. We can't even simulate the simplest molecular interactions fully. Even a collision of two hydrogen atoms is too hard - time resolution and space…
Afaik you can't even simulate double-slit in high-end offline VFX renderers without custom programming