OpenCL Particle System
Progress report: week 3
During the past week I’ve been experience a lot of problems. The main issue right now is that I’m unable to run my application – without the operating system to freeze! This has lead to several hours of running check disk; I have to cut the power to restart the computer which causes corrupted project files. This might be caused by some kind of bug related to the OpenCL drivers, which somehow is triggered by my application – but it’s quite tough to solve the issue as I’m unable to run the code. However, it seems that the problem only occurs on Windows XP (while Windows 7 is unaffected), and thus I’ll bring my Win7 laptop at Monday, and work it out.
The past week has (luckily) not only been about problems though – I’ve also made some progress. My particle kernel now receives several particle attributes, and the particles burst out from the emitter in a spherical form. I’m sending an array of a structure containing all the particles’ attributes, so it’s quite easy to add additional ones if required. This means that I’m done with the prototype (as soon as I’ve fixed the bug) which was originally scheduled for milestone two – i.e. one week earlier than expected.
I’ve read a couple of papers about working with fluids using particle systems, but I haven’t made any real progress about it yet. I would prefer an algorithm which is adaptable for both smoke and water. I also ran into the parallel sorting algorithm “bitonic mergesort”, which I have never used before, that will likely come handy.
I will upload a picture of what I’ve done so far as soon as the application allows me to do this, without my computer to like… die.
Update! Image is now available!
Next entry: Shortfilm, HVFX - helicopterPOV
Previous entry: week summary