[Soc-2012-dev] Weekly progress report #10 - Smoke Simulator Improvements

[Miika Hämäläinen]

> What you did this week

* I added a new system that sets active simulation fields dynamically 
based on domain content.
- For example fire related data/simulation is only processed when there 
is a fire type brush affecting the domain. Color data is enabled only 
when multiple colors are needed.
- This way most simulations require less disk space and are faster to 
calculate compared to previous branch versions.
* Tweaked smoke 3D-view shader to match previous non-colored version.
* Fixed memory leak with smoke colors.
* Spent one more day trying to fix that high resolution artifact bug I 
discovered last week. It seems to be limited to certain non-cubic domain 
resolutions, but strangely only to y-axis. I still couldn't figure what 
causes it.
* I started investigating ways to improve fire simulation quality. For 
now I'm investigating ways to add more turbulence to smoke/fire emitted 
from meshes. My current solution is to add a way to use animated noise 
(or texture) to control emission strength. This way different areas of 
the mesh emit smoke/fire at different rates causing additional 
turbulence typical for fire.

> What you plan to do next week

I'll continue with smaller improvements, focusing on improving fire 
simulations.