Earthquake Simulation Engine

Question

I'm interested to simulate the response of a structural building ( such as WTC before 911) under earthquake load. Actually I have all the Finite element things work out, and I have already calculated the displacement, velocity and acceleration response of the building under that particular earthquake load.

The one thing that I have problem is the rendering/ animation part. I want the animation to match as closely as possible to the calculated response. The current engine I have ( built in OpenGL) seems not being able to cope this because of the large amount of data it needs to load into the memory before the simulation starts. I am thinking about modifying the engine so that it can multithread to load displacement data from file on one hand and rendering it on another. But I afraid that I don't have enough time and mental power to do it.

So I'm looking for a animation engine, which would support what I want to do. Any idea?

Answer 1

If you are using immediate mode, switch to frame buffer objects (FBO). Apparently they are well suited for dynamic meshes because you can gain access to the mesh as it stored in the graphics memory and manipulated directly.

I haven't actually used them, I just know they exists. I am hoping soneone else can further elaborate more.