[Bf-committers] Blender Mantaflow integration

[David Ullmann]

Hi everyone!

My name is David and first of all thank you Sebastián for your work on the
Mantaflow integration! I'm really looking forward to
having its features available in blender.

I'm just coding for fun in my spare time (I'm an orthopedic surgeon), so
when I was looking for a new project to play with
I decided to have a look at Mantaflow and eventually build my own little
gui to visualize simulation output.
Since I wanted to work in C++ alone, I modified Manta's code to be able to
call the solver via C++
without building the Python wrapper (which also allowed me to skip the
preprocessing step when
building Mantaflow). While it's surely debatable if this was really
necessary (or intelligent), it at least gave me the opportunity
to familiarize myself with the library to some degree (also this process
satisfies my OCD tendencies, ahem...).

Long story short, I gathered all my courage, started to cleanup the code a
bit and published my modified version of Mantaflow on GitHub.
One motivation was a concern raised by Kévin Dietrich on blenderartists:

*"The main thing that bothers me is the way Mantaflow works, you need to
feed it a python script and a set of OBJ files.*
*So in the Blender integration, it feels a bit hackish. Maybe there's a way
to get to the C++ code directly, but I don't really know Mantaflow, so I
can't tell"*

I'm really not sure if my modifications are useful for anyone but me
(knowing that my skills are nothing compared to all
the pros here) but then at least I had a lot of fun and learned a lot while
playing around :)

modified Mantaflow repo: https://github.com/robocyte/mantaflow
thread on BA:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?373547-Lets-talk-about-Mantaflow


Cheers,
David