FuLBLINKy

Fully-unified Lattice-Boltzmann Loosely INtegrated Kit for you

In other words: a vector field visualizer focused on 3D fluid data, with an interface to allow you to visualize results directly from a simulator. We're also working on some Lattice-Boltzmann-specific visualization tools to help with building and debugging.

Out-of-the box, we currently support visualization of arbitrary vector field data from legacy .vtk files, as well as direct visualization from a small LBM fluid simulator. The project supports both Linux and Windows, and may see OSX support in the future if there's interest.

Our primary goal is to someday make your fluid visualization tasks for small-to-medium datasets easier and more intuitive.

Use git clone --recursive when cloning this repo for the first time.

This project and lbsim were both produced with the help of the CFD Lab at the Chair of Scientific Computing at TUM. To make using lbsim easier, there is an HTML5-based graphical editor for creating problem domains in the lb_ed repository.

NativeFileDialog was created by Michael Labbe.

Build Dependencies

• GLFW3 (http://www.glfw.org/)
• GLEW (http://glew.sourceforge.net/)
• GLM (http://glm.g-truc.net/0.9.6/index.html)
• CEGUI 0.8+ (http://cegui.org.uk/)
• GTK 3.0+ (only under Linux)
• A graphics driver compatible with OpenGL 3.3+

Build Instructions - Linux

• Install dependencies for OpenGL development, GTK, GLFW & CEGUI first (this includes GLM, so there's no need to build & install it separately):

  sudo apt-get install cmake xorg-dev libglu1-mesa-dev cmake-curses-gui libglew-dev libglm-dev libgtk-3-dev

  NOTE: CEGUI also requires an image codec (like libfreeimage or DevIL) and an XML reader. Many systems will already have both, but if not you should be able to apt-get the library of your choice. e.g.

  sudo apt-get install libfreeimage-dev libxml2-dev libexpat1-dev

  Build GLFW

  GLFW 3 is not available in package form for all distributions. If you can't find it in your package manager (most only have GLFW 2), you'll have to build & install it from source.

• Download & extract the GLFW source from here: http://www.glfw.org/download.html

• Create a directory to build in:

  mkdir build
  cd build

• Configure GLFW to build as a Shared Object

  ccmake <path_to_GLFW_source_dir>
    - Press 'c' to configure the project
    - Place cursor on option labeled BUILD_SHARED_LIBS, and press 'enter' to toggle it to ON
    - Press 'g' to generate & exit

• Build & install GLFW

  make
  sudo make install

  Build CEGUI

  CEGUI 0.8 is not currently available in package form, and needs to be built & installed from source

• Download & extract the CEGUI source from here: http://cegui.org.uk/download

• Instructions are available in the README.md file in their source package, but I'll summarize them here

• Create a directory to build in:

  mkdir build
  cd build

• Configure CEGUI. The default options should be fine.

  cmake <path_to_CEGUI_source_dir>

• Build & install CEGUI

  make
  sudo make install

  Build the Visualizer

  If everything went well with the above steps, you should now have everything you need to build the project. Just make sure your LD_LIBRARY_PATH points to the location the GLFW and CEGUI libs were installed to (/usr/local/lib by default) and run make from the project directory.

  Taking the visualizer out of the source tree

  Apart from the final executable, you also need to copy the shaders and cegui_layout directories, which contain files necessary for the program to function. The build directory just contains object and dependency files generated during the build, and can safely be deleted or ignored.

Build Instructions - Windows

You will need:

• Visual Studio 2015: https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/downloads/download-visual-studio-vs.aspx
• CMake: https://cmake.org/download/
• The dependencies listed at the top of this document

Dependencies

• 64-bit Windows binaries for GLFW and GLEW are available from the links above
• GLM is a header-only library and does not require any extra steps.
• CEGUI will need be built from source using CMake and Visual Studio. To build CEGUI, you will first need to build the CEGUI Dependencies package, and then copy the result (the dependencies directory in the output) into the CEGUI source directory. CEGUI dependencies are documented here: http://static.cegui.org.uk/docs/0.8.4/building_deps.html
  • Make sure to build BOTH Debug and Release versions of each library if you want to be able to build both versions of this project! (if you only need Release, though, it's fine to just build the Release version of CEGUI and its dependencies)

Development Environment Configuration

Several environment variables need to be configured before launching Visual Studio and building the project. These all point to the headers and LIB files from the dependencies above. A short batch file, devenv.bat (in the vs_2015 directory), will set these for you, but you must edit this file to fill in the paths to the library locations on your local machine.

CEGUI_ROOT - Path to the root directory of CEGUI's source
GLFW_ROOT  - Path to the root GLFW folder
GLEW_ROOT  - Path to the root GLEW folder
GLM_ROOT   - Path to the root GLM folder

Once this is done, you should be able to open the project solution and build successfully!