Hi all,
I am doing a university project on air pollution monitoring with UAVs in urban environments. I am trying to simulate how air pollutants flow around skyscrapers (essentially just tall cubes in my scene). I started by simply having a particle emitter and cube with a collider component but the particles just get stuck on one face of the cube. I then messed around with particle force fields to try to mimic the way a fluid would wrap around a skyscraper but am finding it very difficult to achieve the effect.
As you do, I tried researching the topic on the internet and have now fallen down a deep rabbit hole of everything from importing CFD simulations to programming in Navier-Stokes equations and setting up CPU / GPU simulations. I want to find a simple way of implementing a fluid flow around a tall cube so that I could then program a UAV which would fly around and detect pollutant particles with box colliders.
I have discovered assets like MegaFlow but I believe they require you to import in your vector field data. There are videos on YouTube about programming Eulerian fluid simulations (albeit in 2D) so perhaps I could extend this to another dimension and implement it in my environment. However, I feel like I am significantly overcomplicating this and should be able to do it more simply. If anyone could share any of their tips or experience in this I would be incredibly grateful!