Notes / G.04
Advection moves; projection makes it incompressible.
A Stable Fluids solver advances velocity through advection and forces, then projects the field so that it satisfies the incompressibility constraint.
01 / Mental model
Store motion in space, not on particles.
An Eulerian solver stores velocity and density on a fixed grid. At each time step, the field carries quantities through the domain, external forces change the motion, and pressure removes unwanted compression.
02 / Core mechanism
Split a difficult equation into manageable stages.
Semi-Lagrangian advection provides stability; the pressure projection solves a Poisson problem and subtracts its gradient to produce a divergence-free velocity field.
03 / Implementation
Make every stage testable.
- Backtrace through the velocity field and interpolate the previous values.
- Add forces and apply consistent boundary conditions.
- Solve pressure from the velocity divergence.
- Subtract the pressure gradient, then advect density for visualization.
04 / Evidence
Measure the constraint behind the motion.
Check divergence after projection, not only whether the smoke looks fluid. Vortices and coherent transport indicate useful motion; excessive blur exposes numerical diffusion, while boundary leaks point to inconsistent edge handling.
