Advances in computational power have lead to many developments in science and en- tertainment. Powerful simulations which required expensive supercomputers can now be carried out on a consumer personal computer and many children and young adults spend countless hours playing sophisticated computer games. The focus of this research is the development of tools which can help bring the entertaining and appealing traits of video games to scientific education. Video game developers use many tools and programming languages to build their games, for example the Blender 3D content creation suite. Blender includes a Game Engine that can be used to design and develop sophisticated interactive experiences. One important tool in computer graphics and animation is the particle system, which makes simulated effects such as fire, smoke and fluids possible. The particle system available in Blender is unfortunately not available in the Blender Game Engine because it is not fast enough to run in real-time. One of the main factors contributing to the rise in computational power and the increas- ing sophistication of video games is the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). Many consumer personal computers are equipped with powerful GPUs which can be harnassed for general purpose computation. This thesis presents a particle system library is accelerated by the GPU using the OpenCL programming language. The library integrated into the Blender Game Engine providing an interactive platform for exploring fluid dynamics and creating video games with realistic water effects. The primary system implemented in this research is a fluid sim- ulator using the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics technique for simulating incompressible fluids such as water. The library created for this thesis can simulate water using SPH at 40fps with upwards x  of 100,000 particles on an NVIDIA GTX480 GPU. The fluid system has interactive features such as object collision, and the ability to add and remove particles dynamically. These features as well as phsyical properties of the simulation can be controlled intuitively from the user interface of Blender. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of ScientifiC Computing in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science. / Fall Semester, 2011. / August 24, 2011. / Game Design, GPU, OpenCL, SPH / Includes bibliographical references. / Gordon Erlebacher, Professor Directing Thesis; Tomasz Plewa, Committee Member; Anter El-Azab, Committee Member.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_182933 |
| Contributors | Johnson, Ian (authoraut), Erlebacher, Gordon (professor directing thesis), Plewa, Tomasz (committee member), El-Azab, Anter (committee member), Department of Scientific Computing (degree granting department), Florida State University (degree granting institution) |
| Publisher | Florida State University, Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, text |
| Format | 1 online resource, computer, application/pdf |
| Rights | This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). The copyright in theses and dissertations completed at Florida State University is held by the students who author them. |
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