Lava that really flows, terrain that truly evolves, a homemade physics and rendering engine that simulates eruptions in real time, and renders them close to photorealistic quality !
Volcano Simulator is a real-time geological playground built around the Piton de la Fournaise on Réunion Island - one of the most active volcanoes on Earth.
Open a crack, set the flow rate and the temperature, then watch the result ! Lava is a non-Newtonian fluid - its viscosity shifts constantly with temperature, crystal growth, and physical stress - it finds its own path down the slope, builds levees at the edges of its channel, crusts over, cools, and permanently reshapes the ground it ran across !
The whole state of the world lives on the graphics card memory as a grid of stacked layers, and the renderer reads in real-time the buffers the solver writes.
Every playground/real-life location - like the one running at the Cité du Volcan - can be rebuilt on another volcano from its digital elevation model. If you would like to deploy a simulator, or you simply have a question about the project, get in touch !
