r/Simulated Sep 22 '18

Meta What is a simulation? A detailed comparison between Animation, and Simulation.

960 Upvotes

Ever since this subreddit started getting more traction, more and more people began posting non-simulation videos. In each of these posts, users will comment something along the lines of "This is not a simulation," and an argument would ensue. So I am writing this post to, hopefully, end this never-ending cycle. I hope the mods do not remove this post, because I think it could end much of the hostility in the comments around here. Perhaps this could even be a stickied post, so all new users see it.

What is a simulation?

According to the dictionary, the word simulation is defined as, "imitation of a situation or process." However, this definition does not actually constitute what a simulation is in the world of CGI. In CGI, simulations are essentially visualizations of real-world processes that are generated using mathematical models. That is to say, the final product of a simulation is something that was created using fundamental rules of nature or some system, such as Newton's Laws of Motion, Fluid Dynamics, or various other mathematical models. In a simulation, it is often the case that each frame was created by manipulating information from the previous frame.

How are simulations different from animations?

It's quite common for animations and simulations to coexist in one medium. There are plenty of simulated components in animated movies, such as Disney's Frozen (Snow simulation), and Hotel Transylvania 2 (Cloth simulation). However, simulations and animations individually are very different by nature. As previously stated, simulations try to model real-world processes, and use mathematical models to generate necessary data. Animations, on the other hand, are usually created through a manual process. Animators manually keyframe the attributes (position, rotation, scale, etc.) of objects in a 3D scene. It's possible for manual animations to look convincing, but that does not make them simulations.

The "Ray tracing)" argument.

Many 3D rendering engines use a process called "ray tracing" to create images of a 3D scene. For anyone who is unfamiliar with ray tracing, here is the definition from Wikipedia:

In computer graphics, ray tracing is a rendering) technique for generating an image by tracing the path of light as pixels in an image plane and simulating the effects of its encounters with virtual objects.

Because of this definition, many people argue that any 3D render is a simulation, so long as it was rendered using ray tracing. By definition, it is true that the process of ray tracing is a simulation. However, this argument is very silly because the entire purpose of the term "simulation" in CGI is to make a distinction between what is manually created, and what is created using the previously talked about mathematical models. Therefore, when we discuss simulated graphics, ray tracing is not considered a simulated process.

Examples of animated (non-simulated) posts:

  1. "Satisfying simulations" - 3.4k upvotes
  2. "Bender's old job" - 2.2k upvotes
  3. "Up or Down?" - 1.4k upvotes
  4. "Adobe Dimention Rendering" - 1.4k upvotes
  5. "Depression - Robert Ek"

Many of these animated posts accumulate upvotes, and sometimes they stick around for a few days before getting removed. Because of this, new users who see these posts get a false idea of what a simulation actually is. Hopefully this post was informative to any newcomers. If you would like to suggest edits, please comment.


r/Simulated 6h ago

Blender Pool Guy 3 has begun.

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49 Upvotes

r/Simulated 9h ago

Solved Funny mistake that occurred on MatLab

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17 Upvotes

r/Simulated 1d ago

Houdini When you park like a jackass, a giant alien octopus comes and crushes your car.

220 Upvotes

r/Simulated 4h ago

Blender Bringing two concepts together. <3

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2 Upvotes

r/Simulated 17h ago

Houdini Simulating Mandelbrot fractal orbits

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6 Upvotes

r/Simulated 12h ago

Question Gravity particle simulation help

0 Upvotes

I have been messing around with simulating particles in space with gravity, however when simulating large numbers of particles it gets slow. I had an idea where for each particle you calculate the force it exerts on the environment and add it to a image that stores the sum of the forces for every particle, and then you can sample the texture for each particle and get the force acting on it. This way you only operate on each particle 2 times.

My problem is i cannot think of a way to implement this method effectively, so if anyone has any ideas that would be much appreciated.

Also i know about other optimisation methods but i wanted to try something new.


r/Simulated 1d ago

Interactive Plush Shader

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17 Upvotes

r/Simulated 2d ago

Research Simulation Dude, where's my boat? :(

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50 Upvotes

r/Simulated 2d ago

Research Simulation Exploring a 3D-Prey-Predator model with over 125,000 simultaneously visualized states

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15 Upvotes

r/Simulated 2d ago

Research Simulation Exploring a Predator-Prey Model | Visualization of the Lotka-Volterra Equations.

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15 Upvotes

r/Simulated 3d ago

Houdini Mixing Fluids & Colors

92 Upvotes

r/Simulated 2d ago

Proprietary Software Peter de Jong Attractor Animation

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2 Upvotes

r/Simulated 4d ago

EmberGen NeRFy

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97 Upvotes

r/Simulated 3d ago

Interactive CA consumes a box and starts its cyclic pattern

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43 Upvotes

This is captured from my upcoming iPhone app for interactive voxel effects.


r/Simulated 4d ago

Blender Holy cloth!

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60 Upvotes

Testing out some cloth simulation with different shapes lately


r/Simulated 4d ago

Houdini The weight of holiness

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57 Upvotes

r/Simulated 4d ago

Houdini Lick it up

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356 Upvotes

r/Simulated 3d ago

Question Need help figuring out the best way to simulate large numbers of particles dropping on a plane

1 Upvotes

Hey guys !

I'm running into a problem that seemed easy to solve at first but now that i have to solve it, it's another story haha

Basically, I want to drop a bunch of cubes on a plane, and simulate that. The problem is, I want to simulated thousands of them, like 100.000 of them, and have it remain RELATIVELY physically accurate (i'm not chasing ultra precision, i just want it to look natural.)

I originaly started using C4D's physics system with a cloner in array mode, a cube in it and it worked until i cranked the numbers past 8-10K cubes. The simulation is getting VERY slow (if not unplayable), and I succesfully crashed my pc trying bigger numbers :')

So I switched to X-particles in hopes of getting better performances, but sadly it seems that it isnt really any better when i'm enabling particle to particle collision or use the bullet physics system.

Soooo I guess my question would be : what can I use to do such simulations ? I'd rather use anything that can be used natively inside Cinema4D, but if needed I can switch to another software; I just need it to be able to export those simulations back to C4D for rendering after ^^

Thanks in advance for any help ! Have a good day !


r/Simulated 4d ago

Interactive A sphere consumed by an unsuccessful cyclical automaton

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49 Upvotes

r/Simulated 4d ago

Cinema 4D Worms

35 Upvotes

Cinema4D cloth experiment, thought it looked nice rendered in this simple line art style.


r/Simulated 4d ago

Blender Particle physics

0 Upvotes

What's the best, real time particle physics simulator? Something that will run smooth on a rtx3070(laptop)


r/Simulated 6d ago

Redshift Testing water bending

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193 Upvotes

r/Simulated 5d ago

Various 13th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Music, Sound, Art and Design (EvoMUSART)

3 Upvotes

We are organizing the 13th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Music, Sound, Art and Design (EvoMUSART) and we think it may be of interest to many of you. The conference will take place in Aberystwyth, Wales, United Kingdom, between 3 and 5 April 2024.

If you work with Artificial Intelligence techniques applied to visual art, music, sound synthesis, architecture, video, poetry, design, or other creative tasks, you can present your work at this conference. The deadline for paper submissions is 1 November 2023.

If not, it is also a great opportunity to know all the news of research in these fields.
For more information, visit the event's webpage: https://www.evostar.org/2024/evomusart/


r/Simulated 5d ago

Research Simulation Earthquake Comparison - Surface Fault Rupture (0-20 feet!)

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5 Upvotes