Beer project is a lot of froth and bubble

[KiwiCoromandel]

Learning how to pour a beer is the latest challenge facing the CSIRO, which hopes to devise a convincing animation of this great Australian pastime.

The project is part of a four-year venture to simulate realistically the movement of water for the movie and gaming industries using complex mathematical algorithms.

CSIRO research scientist Mahesh Prakash said the biggest challenge in creating the animation of liquids was to capture the behaviour of motion, foam, bubbles and splashes - and this is where beer comes in.

"One of our test cases is to look at the flow of beer. As beer flows into a mug, it creates quite a few bubbles and then forms a foam on top, which poses a very difficult challenge from a physics point of view," he said.

The now-completed first stage of the project recreated some scenes from the sinking of the Titanic to illustrate how animation could depict the motion of water.

Mr Prakash said that, to develop the animation, the CSIRO had to first calculate water flow behaviours using extremely complex mathematical models that were then rendered onto simulation software.

"To create this animation, we had to simulate the motion of a number of different objects. That was quite challenging to do using proper physics and is something we believe is quite unique in our simulations," he said.

Mr Prakash said the most difficult aspect was to develop adequate resolution.

"If you have a lack of resolution in the animation, the fluid will look more like flowing ice than water," he said.

He said the use of Computational Fluid Dynamics delivered greater resolution by allowing animators to control every individual particle in a fluid, rather than using a grid or mesh to give them shape.

The next stage of the project, due at the end of this year, is to animate a number of individual activities such as the pouring of a beer, in order to simulate other liquid behaviours such as formation of bubbles, foam and spray.

At the end of the four years the CSIRO hopes to have built software tools that will easily allow movie and gaming animators to convincingly recreate fluid flows, waves, bubbles, spray, eddies and whirlpools.

The four-year project is being run in conjunction with the Korean Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute.

source:AP

image:AP:Ken Robertson..and beer.. :)