Thursday, October 30th, 2014 Posted by Jim Thacker

Cool tech demo: the Project Proteus fluid simulator

One of the interesting things about Eric Mootz’s demo video for emPolygonizer 5 – apart from showing off a great particle-meshing tool – was that some of the base simulations were generated in Project Proteus.

Described as the “next generation of fluid simulation software”, Proteus is being developed by 52 Technology, a spin-off of the Computer Science department at the University of Freiburg.

Reliable, physically based prototyping
It’s physically based, so there’s no loss or gain of volume during simulations, leading to accurate boundary handling and surface reconstruction – there are some great shots in the demo video above of liquids flowing through complex geometry, including what looks like a giant hairball.

There isn’t much information on the project page, but the video hints at its capabilities, including coupled fluid/rigid body interactions; foam and spray; viscous fluids; and a teasing mention of keyframe animation.

Efficient CPU usage
Proteus is described as 100% parallelised, with a 20-million-particle simulation computing in two hours per second (not per frame) on what looks to be a 12-core Intel Xeon X5690-based machine with 24GB RAM.

Again, there isn’t much information on pipeline integration, but Proteus is described as supporting Alembic and a particle export library.

Sign up for the closed beta
The closed beta for Proteus is “starting soon”. You can register your interest via the form on the software’s project page below.

Updated: 52 Technology tells us that the beta will start “soon after the next development milestone”, but that there is no specific timescale yet. “We don’t want to rush it, since our focus is on the user experience.”

Read more about Project Proteus on the software’s website
(Includes registration form for the closed beta)