Liquid physics

News & General Discussion
1

How comes Unity doesn’t have liquid physics, something like this? :

2

For two reasons:

  1. Liquid physics was added in a later version of PhysX than Unity uses (UT had to port to OSX and modify it themself no physx driver)

  2. Without a NVIDIA graphic card that can handle cuda (-> 8400GT minimum) and rendering at the same time, you can’t use it realistically at all.
    The card you see in that video has as much power as a 32 core i7 or a tri sli GTX 285++
    Already the simple fluid physics example of the physx sdk (a simple box world and really very few fluid elements) runs at 30fps and less and that on a Core i7 920 if I disable hardware physx.

So realistically: before 2012 - 2014 you won’t be able to use it in games for mainstream users

3

ah, well but I wasn’t talking about nvidia physx.
I was just giving an example of what I mean by liquid physics.
Like in many games you can see the nice liquid such as blood, water and other stuff. Not necessarily the Nvidia’s physx :slight_smile:

4

Why not? It’s a performance intensive item that just hasn’t ever made the cut as truly “necessary” compared to the other features we’ve been working on. Is it something we’d like to see in Unity? You bet! But again, each release involves us having to make hard decisions about what features we’ll do now and what features we’ll do later, and those decisions are based on perceived importance, relevance to our users, potential future “vision” we have, and many others.

Another wrinkle worth noting is that PhysX implemented soft-body dynamics in a later version than we have now, and that newer version is not backwards compatible so it would “break” content. That makes the change a bit more severe and in need of more work and planning. For reference, this upgrade issue with backwards compatibility is noted on our Feedback site:

Physics: Upgrade PhysX

5

Thanks for an answer Hibby.
I hope that we will see liquid physics in Unity in the future :slight_smile:

6

Hibby-G is your awesomest BFF! He will make your blood flow like water. :smile:

7

its at the time the by far most uneeded feature as at very bast 0.5% of all users can use it. most would be happy if we had the updated physx for better performance on what we have + softbody + cloths :slight_smile: