I'm researching the following problem:
Let's say I have a glass of some fluid (water for example). The fluid is completely transparent and I don't have to render it at all.
However a ink drop is dropped in the glass and it's spreading in the water.
The whole thing should be 3D and user should be able to rotate the camera and see the spreading in real time.
I have researched a couple of way to approach this problem, but it turned out that most of them are dead end.
Тhe only approach that has some success was to use enormous amount of particles which form the skeleton of the "inc spread". The physics simulation of the process of spreading is far form perfect, but let's say it's not a problem.
The problem is the rendering part.
As far as I know I'll not be able to speed up the z-sort process greatly by using the flash GPU acceleration, because the upload of those particles to the GPU memory every frame is quite slow? Can somebody confirm that please?
The other thing that I'm struggling with is the final render. I tried a whole bunch of filters in combination with "post process" techniques to create smooth lines and gradients between the dots, but the result it terrible. If somebody know some article that could help me with that I'll be very grateful.
Overall if there is another viable approach tho the problem please let me know.
Thanks in advance.
Cheers.