SF_Reproduction — 3D Stable Fluids Simulation

A 3D fluid simulation reproducing Jos Stam's Stable Fluids (SIGGRAPH 1999) paper.
Built with ImGui + OpenGL 3.3, featuring volume ray-marching and full simulation pipeline under both periodic and fixed boundary conditions.

Release

Compiled executable files for windows at here.

Reference Paper

reference/stam-stable_fluids.pdf

Simulation Pipeline

Each timestep follows the paper's order:

AddForce (buoyancy) 
→ Advect (semi-Lagrangian, MAC grid)
→ Diffuse (implicit viscosity, Jacobi iteration)
→ Project (pressure Poisson: FFT for periodic, Jacobi for fixed BC)
→ Advect density through divergence-free velocity

Features

• MAC staggered grid: velocity on faces, density/pressure at cell centers
• Semi-Lagrangian advection: trilinear backtracing
• Periodic BC: spectral Poisson solver via 3D FFT (self-implemented radix-2 Cooley-Tukey)
• Fixed BC: Jacobi iteration Poisson solver (replacing FISHPAK from the paper)
• Volume rendering: GPU ray-marching, rainbow density colormap, dual-light shading
• Interaction: left-click injects force + smoke, right-drag orbits camera, WASD to move
• Full UI controls: grid resolution, timestep, viscosity, buoyancy, dissipation, diffusion, etc.

Build

Requires CMake + OpenGL 3.3 + glfw3.

cd build
cmake .. -G "MinGW Makefiles"
mingw32-make
./SF_Reproduction.exe

For better performance, build in Release mode:

cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -G "MinGW Makefiles"
mingw32-make

Controls

Input	Action
Left-click drag	Inject smoke force
Right-click drag	Rotate camera
WASD	Move
Scroll	Zoom
UI panel	Tune all parameters

Acknowledgements

• Jos Stam, Real-Time Fluid Dynamics for Games, SIGGRAPH 1999
• This project was developed with assistance from DeepSeek V4