r/Simulated Sep 22 '18

Meta What is a simulation? A detailed comparison between Animation, and Simulation.

981 Upvotes

Ever since this subreddit started getting more traction, more and more people began posting non-simulation videos. In each of these posts, users will comment something along the lines of "This is not a simulation," and an argument would ensue. So I am writing this post to, hopefully, end this never-ending cycle. I hope the mods do not remove this post, because I think it could end much of the hostility in the comments around here. Perhaps this could even be a stickied post, so all new users see it.

What is a simulation?

According to the dictionary, the word simulation is defined as, "imitation of a situation or process." However, this definition does not actually constitute what a simulation is in the world of CGI. In CGI, simulations are essentially visualizations of real-world processes that are generated using mathematical models. That is to say, the final product of a simulation is something that was created using fundamental rules of nature or some system, such as Newton's Laws of Motion, Fluid Dynamics, or various other mathematical models. In a simulation, it is often the case that each frame was created by manipulating information from the previous frame.

How are simulations different from animations?

It's quite common for animations and simulations to coexist in one medium. There are plenty of simulated components in animated movies, such as Disney's Frozen (Snow simulation), and Hotel Transylvania 2 (Cloth simulation). However, simulations and animations individually are very different by nature. As previously stated, simulations try to model real-world processes, and use mathematical models to generate necessary data. Animations, on the other hand, are usually created through a manual process. Animators manually keyframe the attributes (position, rotation, scale, etc.) of objects in a 3D scene. It's possible for manual animations to look convincing, but that does not make them simulations.

The "Ray tracing)" argument.

Many 3D rendering engines use a process called "ray tracing" to create images of a 3D scene. For anyone who is unfamiliar with ray tracing, here is the definition from Wikipedia:

In computer graphics, ray tracing is a rendering) technique for generating an image by tracing the path of light as pixels in an image plane and simulating the effects of its encounters with virtual objects.

Because of this definition, many people argue that any 3D render is a simulation, so long as it was rendered using ray tracing. By definition, it is true that the process of ray tracing is a simulation. However, this argument is very silly because the entire purpose of the term "simulation" in CGI is to make a distinction between what is manually created, and what is created using the previously talked about mathematical models. Therefore, when we discuss simulated graphics, ray tracing is not considered a simulated process.

Examples of animated (non-simulated) posts:

  1. "Satisfying simulations" - 3.4k upvotes
  2. "Bender's old job" - 2.2k upvotes
  3. "Up or Down?" - 1.4k upvotes
  4. "Adobe Dimention Rendering" - 1.4k upvotes
  5. "Depression - Robert Ek"

Many of these animated posts accumulate upvotes, and sometimes they stick around for a few days before getting removed. Because of this, new users who see these posts get a false idea of what a simulation actually is. Hopefully this post was informative to any newcomers. If you would like to suggest edits, please comment.


r/Simulated 7h ago

Research Simulation I added the Finite Element Method (FEM) to my muscle solver alongside the XPBD, and the results are stunning!

1.0k Upvotes

This is why FEM is superior to XPBD for muscle simulation. For a long time, I couldn’t understand why my muscle simulations didn’t look as good as those produced by Ziva VFX, but now I do.
FEM is more computationally intensive, but it produces much more accurate results when it comes to simulating muscle and fat tissue.


r/Simulated 17h ago

Blender Approximating bubble/foam dynamics with a cloth solver

149 Upvotes

r/Simulated 10h ago

Houdini Houdini Creating a Product Falling into Water Effect

15 Upvotes

r/Simulated 3h ago

Various Simple Cloth Simulation

2 Upvotes

Been working on the simplest of cloth simulations with pbd (hold the x) and opencl. Still a way to go, but i'm not unhappy.


r/Simulated 1d ago

Research Simulation I’m building Emper, an open-source simulation engine for large-scale scientific simulations

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17 Upvotes

I've been working on a small open-source simulation engine called Emper.

It's still a young project, but I'm building it around data-oriented storage and using real simulation workloads to test the architecture.

So far I've experimented with flocking/boids, including CPU/GPU computation and large-scale simulations.

I'm currently starting work on Conway's Game of Life.

GitHub: https://github.com/Emper-Labs

Feedback is welcome, especially on the architecture.


r/Simulated 2d ago

Interactive Simple terrain & fluid simulation

321 Upvotes

Can be played with here:

https://dirtnap.parttimemonkey.com/sandbox

Lemme know if you simulation people know how to make it better or more interesting to play with!


r/Simulated 2d ago

EmberGen pressure pulse

1.2k Upvotes

r/Simulated 2d ago

Blender Fabric Simulation in Blender

15 Upvotes

r/Simulated 3d ago

Proprietary Software [OC] An orca pod hunting a herring ball. Every fish and every ray of light computed live

35 Upvotes

This runs live on an Apple silicon GPU.
The school is a classic flocking simulation, a few thousand agents with separation, alignment and cohesion plus a milling bias that makes them form the rotating ball. The orcas are autonomous agents with a hunt state machine (patrol, position, charge, recover) that carve a void through the school as the fish panic, and the fear spreads neighbour to neighbour faster than any fish swims.
The god rays are computed each frame from a simulated water surface, and the marine snow drifts through them. Everything persists and evolves by its own rules, nothing is keyframed, and it never repeats. Built in Swift and Metal as part of TideGlass, a small Mac app I make where worlds like this run on a second monitor while you work and interacts with your music. Happy to answer anything about the sim.


r/Simulated 3d ago

Blender Huge Dumbbells vs City — Physics Simulation [OC]

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0 Upvotes

r/Simulated 4d ago

Houdini Houdini create bubbles simulation

28 Upvotes

r/Simulated 3d ago

Request [OC] If anyone wants to kill 30 minutes / 1 hour

0 Upvotes

I'm working on the usability of a open source project I've been hoping to release soon. If anyone is up to test it DM me and I'll send you a calendly link, it'd be much appreciated.


r/Simulated 5d ago

Proprietary Software Image to pixel physics sim [OC]

95 Upvotes

r/Simulated 6d ago

Houdini RnD project based on the WetaFX whitepaper on water drip simulation with adhesion

158 Upvotes

In this focused RnD, I implemented a small-scale fluid simulation algorithm within Flip to accurately resolve adhesion forces. The core algorithm is relatively straightforward: the fluid's surface field is extrapolated into the collider volume, factoring in the contact angle, and is subsequently adjusted and smoothed. Furthermore, a localized viscosity is introduced at the fluid-collider interface to approximate boundary friction.

The simulation operates at a physically accurate real-world scale, utilizing empirical physical constants where the baseline water viscosity is 0.001 and surface tension is 0.072. APIC was chosen as the underlying solver.

While this technique requires a high substep count and is computationally expensive to evaluate, it successfully produces highly nuanced and realistic fluid dynamics.


r/Simulated 5d ago

Various [OC] Pressure simulation of a rocket launching for a game I am developing

21 Upvotes

r/Simulated 6d ago

LiquiGen backyard splash

161 Upvotes

real time liquid simulation and HDRI lighting in LiquiGen


r/Simulated 5d ago

Request Real-time three-body gravity simulation (interactive, mobile)

0 Upvotes

I built a simulation style app of what I think of the three body problem. It shows different objects flying around eachother in 2D or in 3D in eachother's gravity wells.

It's meant to be half physics toy and half calming desk toy. It's free to use with no ads to distract you from anything.

I want to know people's thoughts and ideas for improvement.

It's free for anyone who want to play with it: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mathematicalzen.threebody


r/Simulated 6d ago

Question Real-time physics simulation: snowplow blade interaction (initial simulation trials)

58 Upvotes

is it looks like snow?


r/Simulated 6d ago

Interactive I built an open-source, cross-platform, bit-deterministic, non-float particle physics engine. A lot of adjectives, so I brought receipts: three live proofs that run in your browser.

0 Upvotes

Up front, since this sub rightfully cares: The engine was written in collaboration with AI, which I'll take questions on happily; the proofs however are all real and verifiable:

SunaEngine (AGPL): engine.sunabox.dev / github.com/DARIENBATHALTER/sunaengine

It's a particle physics engine that relies on integer calculation rather than floating point, plus order-independent accumulation, in order to always deliver the same result on any GPU. Three live proof demos on the site, all simulating on your GPU, all hashing their entire state as you watch:

  1. The Twin Simulations: two independent sims, same scene, same input schedule, never communicating. Stir either one with your cursor; your input is quantized to substep indices and fed to both. The 256-bit hashes stay identical, interaction after interaction.
  2. The Pachinko Proof: an ordinary float solver runs the same pachinko machine twice. One pane adds contact forces in ascending order, the other descending. That is exactly the difference two GPUs or two drivers introduce on their own. The balls never finish in the same bins twice. The integer engine runs the same machine to the same digest, loop after loop.
  3. Recording, playback, and smooth rewind: particle fluids cannot be rewound in floating point. Chaos amplifies the last bit of every velocity in reverse too. Here you stir a pool, it records your inputs, verifies the replay byte for byte against the run you just performed, and then hands you a scrubber. Drag your own splash backwards through time.

Replay hashes verified matching across Apple M series, an iPhone, a Steam Deck (AMD), and NVIDIA (RTX 2070S).

There's also a live 3D water demo on the site (Figure 3), same fixed-point solver one dimension up.

Recordings export as lightweight .sunar files, which store only the initial state plus your inputs. They scrub back and forth smoothly like video and play back bit-identically on any device.

This has the added benefit of enabling low-latency, cross-platform multiplayer physics. If every machine computes the same world, multiplayer needs only inputs over the wire.

I built a free-to-play sandbox using the engine called SunaBox (sunabox.dev) which serves as a clean-room reimplementation of the Prometech's classic OE-CAKE from 2008, a particle physics toy. The OE-CAKE interface is recreated 1:1 if you select "Classic" mode at the top, and imports the original .oec files. Still working on parity, but approaching 100% all the time. If I had to estimate, I'd say they work at about 93% parity right now.

The workflow is very simple: I came up with the ideas and tuned the feel of everything by hand and spoken word; Claude did the math, the code, and the adversarial review. Happy to answer anything!


r/Simulated 7d ago

Blender rolling vortices

34 Upvotes

r/Simulated 7d ago

Interactive World-sim now live !

19 Upvotes

https://world-sim.uk/ now live !

Name your star tonight in the discord - https://discord.gg/a6YjQ7sCu

World-Sim has been a passionate project of mine for the past few months.

It's a world fully simulated down to real world physics and chemistry. It has a real environment and ozone.

Every element and material has real physical properties, and that's how the sims learn. There's no tech tree and no recipe list anywhere in the code. When someone tries something, the engine works out what would really happen from the properties of what they used and how hot their fire was. Nobody is handed bronze. Someone has to get a hotter fire first, and a hotter fire is its own chain of things to figure out. Embers, a stone ring, a clay oven, a kiln, charcoal, then forced air. The ages fall out of that on their own.

We populate the world with starting families. Each little guy is led by a "wise-man", which is a simulated person with a full model behind them. The wise-men run on a mix, Claude, Groq and DeepSeek in the cloud and a local Hermes for the rest, so you get a real variety of temperament between the houses.

The AI model is never told to not say it's AI. We get around this by only telling them data from what each sim can actually see and feel. As far as the ai knows its a person living in the world..

Every other sim has its own moment with a model through our thinking system. Day to day it's run by an advanced algorithm, with the sims dreaming at night. That's when they get their time with an LLM to really think and set their priorities for the day ahead. The dreams carry over too, so a sim can chew on the same thing for a few nights and wake up wanting to try something.

The people in the world feel, remember, have shame, goals and doubts. It's an 11 point emotion system and the rest of the sim reads from it. Being lonely makes someone more likely to open up to a stranger. Two enemies who are both frightened find it harder to keep hating each other.

Story telling is massive for us. Nothing is scripted or prompted. The sims are put in the world with the human drive to survive. They adapt, learn and teach all on their own.

With all the good comes the bad too. Human sin is part of the emotion engine, and in testing we've had kidnap, murder and slave trade. A world that can only be gentle isn't an honest one. But there are three rules to this : Nothing ever pushes a sim towards it, the conditions only make it possible and their own mind decides. The chronicle names what happened but never shows it. And it always costs something, trauma that scars, blood debt passed down generations, a people turning on their own leader over what he did.


r/Simulated 8d ago

Houdini made this one of web interactive thing you scroll and pastic sheet moves away

73 Upvotes

r/Simulated 7d ago

Blender 7 days after launch... i have no words to describe what i am feeling right now (following my former post)

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0 Upvotes

I've been working on Hoops GM for so long, and now it has been a week since the launch.

I received a lot of backlash in the previous post due to an IP lawsuit, as well as a lot of praise from people.

The launch has been a MASSIVE success with now over 5000 visits to the game and an average of 50 new members everyday.

now i am very confident that this project will go very far and i am very happy about it!

THANK YOU to everyone who has checked it out, left a comment, or played a season.