Beer is one of my passions in life. I love the taste of it, the art of it, and the science behind it. Another passion of mine is the science of computer graphics. My college degrees are in computer science where I specialized in computer generated graphics including my thesis. My dream job (at the time) was to work for Industrial Light and Magic where making movies is one of the catalysts for inspiration and innovation in technology to make more computer animation more realistic.
This kind of stuff excites me, so when Al relayed me this article on animating a beer to pour smooth, I now had an excuse to blog about here on Hop Talk. Check this video out.
Apparently, beer was behind the inspiration for these scientists. What makes this so cool is that the animation is not artistically drawn; rather, it is mathematically calculated with a branch of math called computational fluid dynamics. The equations are called smooth particle hydrodynamics algorithms (SPH).
The animation and calculations take into account nucleation sites, the irregular shaped parts of the glass that force bubbles of carbon dioxide to form and float to the top of beer and settle on top of the liquid in the foaming head. I first learned about nucleation sites when I wrote about Jim Koch searching for the perfect beer glass that has laser etched nucleation sites at the bottom of the glass.
All of this science is not lost on beer drinkers; or, at least the kind of beer drinker that reads this beer blog. The science of beer making, zymurgy, is just as complex and so I have no doubt that if you are reading this that you find this interesting as well.
Way back in the olden days, (more than 15 years ago for me) I wrote z-buffer and ray tracing algorithms to draw objects in 3D that took several minutes to draw just one object before there were commonly available hardware accelerators to do the math which involves interesting data structures and a whole lot of linear algebra. Studying things like the refraction of light under water, or the movement of fabric in a breeze, was just taking place and took hours for computers to compute. I am always impressed at what can be done these days in real time, especially appreciating the amount of math that I know is going on behind the scenes. It is one of the reasons I am a big fan of video games. I enjoy the technology in video games as much as the game itself.
If you are interested in more of these videos, I searched for some samples and found all of these interesting as well, even though none are as cool as watching a beer pour.
Titanic the movie: Low bandwidth or Broadband Streaming video
Fire
Real Flow Physics
Water Physics
Hydro-fluid Simulation
World in Conflict DirectX10 features, including particle smoke
