Falmaidan

Welcome to Falmaidan's homepage. Falmaidan is a fluid simulator that allows you to create 3d animations containing effects like splashing water, paint, lava, slime or blood (Have a look at the gallery for some examples). The program works as a preprocessor for scene files. This means you just create a scene as usual, save it, process it with Falmaidan and render its output.

There is also a 2d version of Falmaidan which allows to explore 2d flows directly. Again, see the gallery for some screen shots.

You might be wondering where the name "Falmaidan" comes from. It means "Maker of Waves" in the Elvish language Sindarin from J.R.R. Tolkien's fiction.

Falmaidan is free software. You are invited to look at the source code, to modify it and to give it to others as long as you grant them the same freedoms you have been given.

News

Falmaidan will go through a major rewrite to make the simulation faster and more stable. The changes will be based on Nick Foster's and Ronald Fedkiw's new paper ``Practical Animation of Liquids''.

As I am very busy at the moment, it might take some time until I will be able to resume work on Falmaidan.

Simulation Methods

Currently one simulation method is implemented. It uses a FEM approach to solve the Navier Stokes equations in a regular grid of velocity and pressure values. For more information about this method see the download area and the the paper Realistic Animation of Liquids by Nick Foster and Dimitri Metaxas.

Other simulation methods like SPH (Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics) will be added in the future.

Status

The program is still in an early development phase, so its features are quite limited and the only supported renderer is POV-Ray. Nevertheless even now it is already possible to create quite impressive looking animations. Current work is concentrating on making the simulation more stable and generating a smooth fluid surface.

Requirements

Falmaidan is being developed on a GNU/Linux system but it should be easily compilable on other Unices (Solaris, IRIX and Cygwin have been tried and work) as well. A MS Windows executable is available for download.

If you want to build the 2d version you'll additionally need the Qt library.

You should have plenty of free disk space (1GB for longer animations) if you want to create animations. No additional disk space is needed for using the 2d version.

Authors

Falmaidan was written by Christoph Groth. If you would like to participate in the project by coding, testing or writing documentation contact Christoph per email (the adress can be found at the top of the page). Feel free to mail him with problems and suggestions, too.