An Artist Simulates 50,000 Self-Colliding Particles on a 7-Year-Old GPU

Continuing to push the capabilities of Epic Games' flagship game engine to their limit, Worldbuilding/Technical Artist Eric Anderson has recently unveiled a couple of demos presenting a new exciting experiment with Unreal Engine 5.3.

Taking a step away from his FFT-based ocean simulations, the artist demonstrated the full power of "buckwild" acceleration structures by simulating 50,000 self-colliding and scene-colliding particles in UE5, with orange parts seen in the demos indicating inter-particle pressure. What's most impressive is that this accomplishment was achieved using a seven-year-old GPU, with the creator revealing that the sim was running on GTX 1080Ti.

Eric further noted that his approach is based on Neighbor Grid 3D Interface in Unreal Engine 5's Niagara, which is used to "determine which particles each particle needs to interact with and ignore the rest". The author recommended Ryan James Smith's guide on the topic as the best source of information about this technique.

Earlier, Eric also impressed the internet by unveiling a series of Sea of Thieves-style ocean simulations set up in UE5.3 without any third-party solutions using a standard Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) approach:

And prior to that, the artist experimented with Morten S. Mikkelsen's approach to working with tiling textures without histogram-preservation, leveraging the method to set up a realistic-looking floor surface in Unreal Engine that looks anything but tiled:

We highly encourage you to visit the creator's Twitter page to see more of Eric's awesome experiments with Unreal Engine 5.

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