Water simulation software: waves, sloshing and flow in real time

What you can simulate

• Waves moving across a body of water and reflecting off walls.
• Tank sloshing: water moving about in a tank or container.
• Water flowing around obstacles such as cylinders and blocks.
• Filling and emptying a container.
• Liquid colliding with walls and obstacles, and the effect of viscosity.

Visaria is fluid simulation software for learning, and this is its water solver. You can build the scene in the Mesh Builder from simple shapes, or import your own STL model to act as an obstacle or a container. Visaria voxelises it for you, and you press run.

Why free-surface water is worth watching

A free surface is the boundary where liquid meets air. It can ripple, break, splash and merge, which makes water harder to simulate than the flow in a full pipe, where there is no surface to track. In a fluid mechanics course this is where intuition fails most often: a wave steepens, a jet hits a wall and rebounds, or a filling tank traps an air pocket, and the equations alone do not tell you what to expect.

Seeing it happen in 3D, and changing one thing at a time, closes that gap quickly. Make the liquid thicker and watch it settle differently. Move an obstacle and see how the waves bend around it. Change the solver settings and see what that does to the result. Because it updates as you work, you can try twenty variations in the time it would take to set up one in a conventional package.

Who it is for

• Students of fluid mechanics who want to see free-surface behaviour instead of only reading about it.
• Teachers and lecturers who want a live demonstration they can change in front of a class.
• Makers, hobbyists and designers who want a feel for how liquid will behave around a shape before they build it.
• Anyone curious about how water moves.

How accurate is it?

Visaria uses a coarse voxel grid and solvers tuned for real-time use. It shows behaviour, such as where water goes and how waves form and travel, but its numbers are indicative. Do not use it to size a tank, predict wave loads or make safety decisions. Use it to understand what is happening, then use a validated tool, or measurements, when accuracy matters.

The Water solver is included in the free 7-day trial and in the Pro Bundle, and it can be bought on its own. See pricing.

What you need to run it

Visaria runs on Windows and needs a dedicated graphics card: an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 or AMD Radeon RX 560 is the minimum, and an RTX 2060 or RX 5600 XT or better is recommended, with an 8th-generation Intel Core i5 (or equivalent) and 8 GB of memory. Mac and Linux versions are coming soon. The free trial is the quickest way to check that it runs well on your computer.