hi, I am trying hard to understand microsolver, and chewing really techy sig pappers alonside with solvers and manual about those.
It does making progress slowly, but I feel like most of time I am shooting blind, and it's too time consuming,
even though I could understand some theorictal framework, but to implenment it into houdini and reasemble microsolve to do what you want is differnt thing.
I know there are people here who are good at it, could you please kindly share your experience of learning and approach to an eager newbie?

thank you

That´s a good question.

Peter Claes wrote a paper on it at Bournemouth. Think he posted a link on Odofrce or check Bournemouth. Do a little searching and you should find it.

Or you could try this website .
http://www.peterclaes.be/tutorials/pct_0007.pdf [peterclaes.be]
(Have a look at the references I looked at all the way at the end for more info.)

Julien (bunker) posted some useful info here too:
http://forums.odforce.net/index.php?/topic/12098-some-questions-about-volume-fluids/ [forums.odforce.net]

And this books takes you step by step building towards the fluid equations which is nice:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Simulation-Computer-Graphics-Robert-Bridson/dp/1568813260/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1292414950&sr=8-1 [amazon.co.uk]

pagefan, thanks for info, i am checking it now !!

pcales, thanks for sharing your great work, it's so amazing. I got some reference material that list in your master papper referece, that's where I got most of fluid knowledge so far. The book you mention, and other materials I have gone through all comes with complex equation solving , may I ask, do i need to calculate all the hard math for implenmenting things like you did in papper. Will reading text description be sufficent?
furthur up, how would you get to the point of knowing which node, in what order to make things right. Cause I feel reading papper and implenment in houdini is like different thing to me. I will study the odforce page you mention too.
thank you.

There will probably be some part of the paper that is new and requires some custom math or vops node, but as mentioned in my thesis most of the calculations you want or need to do already exist through the microsolvers.

I highly recommend you to have a look on page 16-17-18 of the thesis where it covers the section on vortex confinement. This really shows how a lot of the math can be translated into microsolvers. You do require a certain base level of math - you need to know what a cross product does for example.

The vortex confinement micorsolver is an otl made up of lower level microsolvers. That is why I find it such a good example. It shows how to manipulate your field data.

When I was studying some of those papers I found a lot of the papers are not that difficult, they are just written in “a difficult way”. It takes a bit of time to get used to reading papers, but you a lot of the concepts are not new and often papers are focusing on optimizations of previous techniques.

The way I often thought about it it is by treating it as if the operations would be taking place on a particle system or how I would do it if I were working with particles, simply because I already had a lot of experience with them. Not everything translates like that, but a lot does - and I find prototyping some math in vops/vex on points in a vopsop with a sopsolver quite fast.

Then from there you can create a custom field in dops and perform the operations with a gasfieldvop or with the existing microsolvers.


About “the hard math”… you don't need to know too much math to get started. What is so nice about Bridson's book is that he builds up the Navier-Stokes equations from Newton's “F=ma”. His book is a collection of several papers he published over the years and I find he has a nice easy to follow writing style. As soon as you don't know something -> wikipedia is your friend .

I am a very visual guy, so if I don't understand something I will:
*)draw a picture/graph,
*) implement the math in a vopsop and apply it to a sphere/grid to test and see what it does, then step by step see what the math does to the end result and reverse engineer so I get it to do what it needs to do.
*) watch a physics video tutorial (Stanford/MIT have free classes on their websites) or ask a colleague to take a little bit of time to explain it to me.
*) Also often some of the things I am trying to do are already implemented in games/processing, and often they share source code beside their tests/applications, you can have a peek at how they do it. - with the added benefit that they have to cut corners to get their speed. They will often also share their sources of info/references so you have the code as well as the papers.

Also it seems I keep posting this a lot lately as I got tired of posting the same books, but if you haven't seen this list, it helped me in my learning process:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Technical-Directors-books/lm/R3ES60SQKYX1EM/ref=cm_lmt_dtpa_f_1_rdssss0 [amazon.co.uk]

Good luck with it!

OMG, thank you peter!! this is by far the most detail and clear study path on this subject I can find across both forum, thank you so much for your time kindly input. I will study hard on this.