I saw that the easyest way to insert water in a scene is to use a water prefab, which by no means is not “real” water, in the sense that it doesn’t adapt to the surface and it does not drain if there is a hole in its container, for example.
Basically, it is just a plain object with a water animation on it.
But what if I’d like to create a lake filled with water? What if I’d like to drain the water from a container? Do I have to use particles?
And last question: would “real” water be too much expensive to use with Gear VR?
“Real” water can’t be created by computers since “real” water constists of molecules. Computers can only simulate water which behaves more or less “realistic”. Even a pure scenentific simulation can’t simulate realistic water. In one single liter of water (at about 4°C) there are about 33427699139605883985567583 water molecules which are interacting with each other. There is no way you could simulate the behaviour of real water.
Most scientific simulations have to do massive simplifications by working with much larger molecules. Have a look at this video. Those are top level simulations but they still have edge cases which do not resemble real water behaviour. They mostly use about 1 million particles for a very limited amount / space.
Creating a water simulation that does flow / spread realistically requires an enourmous amount of computational power. Those simulations in the video will most likely max out the processing power of the PC.
Games always use extreme simplifications or simply create the illusion of real water behaviour. For example if you open a valve, you know that you opened the valve so you can enable a fake flow from the valve and at the same time reduce the water level in the container.
All those examples here are pure fake water simulations. Almost no game uses real particles to simulate water flow. One game that does is: Minecraft. However since minecraft has a quite “large” grid the simulation is very basic. In the alpha version water did flow / spread infinite distances.
This is how realistic water simulation looks in the unreal engine. As you can see it does use huge particles (size of a tennis ball i would guess) and it’s far, far from looking realistic. It looks quite nice for an out-of-the-box solution but no where near realistic.
basically, all fluids in the games are simulated by particles and animated surfaces with realistic materials ( water, blood, lakes, rivers). because creating realistic fluids is too expensive. in 3d design programs like 3ds or blender it is posible by creating a detailed geometry and the moviment is calculated by physics system, vertex per vertex, so it is a heavy process, and, if you do it in a game, it will run in seconds per frames instead of frames per seconds.
I don’t think Unity or actual computers are capable of creating real water, which is a shame… Only Jesus could do something like that. Now that summer is coming, it would be very useful to have some water to drink while working on the computer without having to get up
