In a previous life I spent a lot of time writing and working with software to solve partial differential equations to describe various types of fluid flow. It's a big and complex subject: very roughly speaking the accuracy of the simulation tends to be proportional to the amount of computer power and time spent on it.
A really interesting question in the context of fluid dynamics for games is what is the simplest thing you can do which makes the movement of a fluid look realistic, without worrying about all the details of mass conservation, numerical diffusion etc etc that cause the computational fluid dynamicists to pull their hair out.
A really interesting question in the context of fluid dynamics for games is what is the simplest thing you can do which makes the movement of a fluid look realistic, without worrying about all the details of mass conservation, numerical diffusion etc etc that cause the computational fluid dynamicists to pull their hair out.