[Bf-committers] Flame Simulator

[Lukas Tönne]

Hi Scott and Scott,

Wow, this project was my earliest attempt at getting something working
in Blender source code, about 3 years ago ;)

I haven't been working on it since then and i don't intend to. I
wouldn't mind you picking up the code or just learning from my
mistakes of course, but unfortunately i don't think i have the code
around any more. You may still find some horribly outdated patch on
the interwebs if you're lucky.

However, i'm not convinced any longer of the usefulness of this
feature. It's a very specialized way of making fire effects and with
all the marvelous improvements the smoke simulation in Blender it is a
much more versatile tool for the purpose [2]. The original technique i
tried implementing was already quite dated back then (paper from 2005
iirc).

There are a lot of other todo items that would have greater long-term
benefit for Blender [1]. For instance we intend to make a major
overhaul of the general way physics simulations in Blender work
together. Also the dependency graph is scheduled for refactoring,
which will have a great impact on animation and simulations. Though
these are both large projects which can not be handled by individual
developers alone, because of sheer scale and because they will affect
many different areas of the code.

If you would prefer to work on a feature with more limited scope i'm
sure we can find a more self-contained feature you could work on that
would be both suitable for a student project and have real value for
Blender users in the future. For reference i suggest you take a look
at the kind of projects that have been worked on for Google Summer of
Code (GSOC) in this and previous years ([3], [4]). I would appreciate
if other developers and mentors could chime in.

Regards,
Lukas Tönne

[1] http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:2.5/Source/Development/Todo
[2] http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:MiikaH/GSoC-2012-Smoke-Simulator-Improvements
[3] http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/GoogleSummerOfCode/2012/Overview
[4] http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/GoogleSummerOfCode/2011

On Thu, Oct 25, 2012 at 7:05 AM, Scott Aufderheide <saufderh at nd.edu> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> My name is Scott Aufderheide and I am a junior computer science major at
> the University of Notre Dame. My partner and I are in a data structures
> course, and for our final project we are supposed to work with a open
> source project and try to implement or improve data structures for that
> project. I have been using Blender for just over two years now and jumped
> at the opportunity to work with something I love. I wanted to try to
> contact the developers so that we may work with you to try to make a
> meaningful contribution to the Blender community.
>
> I was looking through the development and project pages and the todo list
> and what caught my eye was the flame
> simulator<http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Phonybone/Fire_simulation_todo>.
> I was hoping to get some clarification on a few things though. After having
> successfully compiled Blender, we began digging through the source files.
> In particular, I've been looking at the smoke and fluid simulator code as a
> possible base/introduction to what may need to be done. After carefully
> going through it, I feel like I have a good, general idea of what is going
> on. At the top of the flame simulator todo page it says, "rename everything
> to flame simulator..." and my question is whether there are already files
> as a starting point to the flame simulator that I could possibly be pointed
> to, or if this needs to be built from the ground up.  Any and all files
> that are being used towards the simulator would be a huge help, and again,
> I want to try to do this right. As for my own starting point, I was looking
> into implementation of the Clenshaw-Curtis quadrature, and while I have
> made some progress on understanding the quadrature and how it might be
> implemented in other programs, I am still not sure how it may be best
> implemented here without looking at where it might be used here first.
>
> I was also hoping to get in contact with any developers who might be
> working on this already, if there is anyone working on it. I would rather
> work with someone than rush in without consideration to the work that
> others have put in already. I can be contacted directly at saufderh at nd.edu.
>
> Apologies for the relative vagueness of my query and I realize that this
> may be a particularly difficult selection to work on, but my partner and I
> are very experienced with C/C++ and we feel that with the time that we have
> to work on this, we can produce something that will be of great benefit to
> the Blender community. That is my goal at least: that this project of ours
> be something that matters and makes a difference.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Scott Aufderheide and Scott Grimes
> Computer Science 2014
> University of Notre Dame
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