Turbulence

My role focused on translating and presenting the 3D physics data for the game. Both physicists and game developers are very skilled at manipulating and designing in 3D with their respective experiments and in their distinct lexicons. However, they needed a skilled 3D designer to help translate between the two, bringing heavy 3D physics data into a low(er)-poly, Unity-viable game world.

With both my computational geometry skills as well as an experience design eye, I helped in both technical areas and design considerations for the 3D experience. Technically I created a custom mesh pipeline for translating physics data into game assets – exporting, decimating, and processing procedurally-generated meshes for the game developers. In parallel, I also sketched out what the user experience may be like for navigating, sifting through, and manipulating 180,000+ amorphous objects.

This progression above shows the processing operations of the turbulent meshes to prep them for exporting to the game.

1. A 2*Pi cube of raw meshes from the physics simulation.
2. The red meshes on the sides line up perfectly but are disjointed.
3. Move one side of these (green) to match up with their pair on the otherside (red)
4. After welding these together, export them as well as geometric information like bounding box size, centroid position, numbers of vertices and faces, etc.

This animation shows the physicists fluid dynamics simulation. Each 3D object in each frame (out of 100 frames) is exported as its own game object to be played with. After much deliberation and testing with the physicists, we found the mesh objects could be decimated ~97% and still maintain the tolerance the physicists for scientific accuracy while getting the size down to something reasonable for a video game.