Check out this amazing technology now avalible for games. Here are some showcase examples made in games: http://www.realflow.com/rf_prod_other.php Demo is avalible for free, while full version costs 4.000 dollars. I am not exactly sure if Unity is supported or how exactly it is handled, but demos are for UE3 and also it says that all engines are supported? It is just amazing to see full proper liquid system in games already.
Games are indeed moving fast. The whole world is speeding up. Stuff like Unity enables smaller developers, to compete, just about.
Realflow is mainly for pre-rendered CG stuff so I don't think it's meant for real-time use unless you bake an animation into a sprite sheet, which is probably what they mean when they say supported by game engines (could be wrong though). All the pictures and stuff on the site seem to be pre-rendered but using the same assets from the games.
If this is for get a sprite sheet at the end there is TimelineFX which is very nice and cost way less.... For fluid sim stuff tho, well do not know either the way they support this really for real time..
Damn, this was a misleading thread. Yeah it supports Unity-based games if you're releasing a pre-rendered trailer.
Nop you are wrong. It can be used for realtime stuff too. I think it is done in two different ways, after checking all videos. One is via animated mesh, where liquid is actually just "baked" into thousands of triangles and it has all animated vertex data when it is exported to game engine. That is how i image it was done in Bioshock, on other hand in Batman it seems like it is done completly trough shader (similar to Overgrowth game), but i am not sure how does realflow makes any sense in usage here. It is for sure used somehow procedural and not premade in app, since you can see that raindrops on Batman are done via flow map and handled completly randomly, just as blood system is done in Overgrowth.
The examples you're pointing to (Batman and Bioshock, also Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Dante's Inferno) are cinematic trailers created by Blur studios. None of the examples on that page are real-time. Doesn't mean your speculation on how it could be done is wrong, just that RealFlow isn't the game engine middleware you make it out to be.
Yeh, RealFlow is mostly used in postprocess rendering. The simulation speed was very VERY slow last time I saw it demoed. Maybe they moved it to GPU now, but I thought NVIDIA already demoed some computational fluid simulation couple of years back (you can probably find the source code on their site), and last not the least, I thought there are already couple of fluid simulation extensions in the Asset Store (Flow Machine $100, Fluvio physics Fluid Dynamics $50 )
I'm actually very familiar to RealFlow because I used to create with it the product viz for a company that produces and sells dancing fountains. I did this for almost 2 years, and no... there is no way you can use it for interactive or real time liquids. What Janpec refers to as baking animation to thousands of poly/tris is known as RealWave and it's a mesh that you can program to behave in a certain manner, create foam splashes, react to rigid bodies, etc., all precalc'd, no real time... and you might export the mesh to a game engine, but you won't get any interactivity whatsoever and end up with a hi-poly object, not to mention that getting an animation loop will be very hard. Those examples Janpec found are for prendered animations. And as "I am da Bawss" said, the process of calculating RealWave (or many dynamic simulations) can be painfully slow... though the results are amazing Extremely cool to use too for collisions, vehicles, crazy explosions, smoke, etc. since it has "Daemons" that can mess in any way you want with gravity, weights, mass, friction, wind... again, all precalc'd, no real time.
If you use it right, there are ways to use Realflow, as I have discovered, it's pretty awesome being able to use all that fluid simulation power even if you are using cached .obj sequences that aren't rippling in real time, if you make a set piece it can look triple AAA standard, so long as you use some cunning tricks My first experiments are shown here:
Here is an example where I was able to export particle meshes from RealFlow into Unity. http://cobweb.cs.uga.edu/~abasu/unity/RFtest/index.html
No, I did not use any 3rd party plugin. It is all homegrown scripting. I used c# to read the particle meshes and play it synchronously.