Particle system

What is it?

When reading a request on Usenet for a fountain model for POV-Ray, I decided to write a small program to simulate the movement of water drops. Like POV, its free for anyone to use, as long as you do not remove my copyright.

Please consider, that particle-system was a quick hack and is far from being elegant designed, efficient coded or well tested.

How do run it?

Make sure, you have got the following:

• tar + gzip or zip, pkzip, ...
• C++ compiler
• perl
• POVRay

I have written this program on Linux 2.0.27 with g++ 2.7.2, but other operating systems and compilers should work without trouble. Using DOS could be a minor annoyance, since I used long filenames and an array with length 20000.

There are two separate programs:

• particle-system performs motion calculations (Euler integration of 3 second order differential equations)
• to-blob.pl to convert the calculated positions to POVRay´s type blob.

After unpacking (tar -zxvf particle-system.tar.gz) just type (make test) to compile the C++ part and execute all the programs including POVRay. If nothing fails, you should have got a picture similar to the one at the beginning of this article.

How to get it?

Click here particle-system.tar.gz (3.6KB) or here particle-system.zip (4.5KB)