What is particle-system?
After reading a request on Usenet for a fountain model for POVRay 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 and well tested.
How do I run particle-system?
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 gcc 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 th POVRay type blob.
After unpacking (tar -ztf 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 particle-system?
Click here particle-system.tar.gz or
here particle-system.zip.