blenderblog

For a bit of inspiration, head over and have a looksee at Ron Fedkiw's site at Stanford University. Apart from being a super-brain in the area of level set methods and dynamic implicit surfaces, Ron also has a long list of awards/scholarships and consults at Industrial Light and Magic, with credits on Terminator 3 and Star Wars III.

My research is focused on the design of new computational algorithms for a variety of applications including computational fluid dynamics and solid mechanics, computer graphics, computer vision and computational biomechanics.

Check out the sample video clips of things like;

• Articulated rigid body simulations
• Melting and burning Lagrangian based solids into Eulerian based fluids
• Robust invertible quasistatic simulations for skinning
• Automatic estimation of facial muscle activations from sparse motion capture marker data
• Two-way solid fluid coupling with thin rigid and deformable solids
• Fluid simulations using a Lagrangian vortex particle method hybridized with an Eulerian grid based solver
• Animations of muscles constructed from the NIH visible human data set
• Robust finite element simulation, even for degenerate and inverted elements
• Simulations of changing mesh topology during simulation
• Simulations on an octree data structure
• Animations of rigid bodies
• Tetrahedral mesh generation
• Animations of cloth
• Animations of water
• Animations of smoke

The list goes on. It's a gold mine of visual stimulation. And near the end of the page is a very interesting project called Mantasuit.

The goal is to design an underwater diving suit that provides a diver with an exoskeleton for enhanced locomotion, as well as augmented reality enhancements for underwater vision and directional sound detection.

Wow!