I'm working on a real-time ballistics simulation of many particles under the effect of highly non-uniform wind. The wind data is obtained from CFD in a form of 2D discretized vector field (unstructured mesh, each grid point has associated with it a vector which tells the direction and magnitude of air velocity).
The problem is that I need to be able to extract the wind vector at any position that a particle occupies, so that aerodynamic drag can be computed and injected into ballistics physics. This is trivial if the wind data can be approximated by an analytical/numerical vector field where a vector can be computed with an algebraic expression. However, the wind data I'm working with is quite complex and there doesn't seem to be any way to approximate it.
I have two ideas:
- Find a way to interpolate the vector field every time each particle's position is updated. This sounds computationally expensive, so I'm not sure if it can be done real-time. Also, the mesh is unstructured, and I'm not sure if 2D interpolation can be done with this kind of mesh.
- Just pick the grid point closest to the particle's position and get the vector from there (given that the mesh is fine enough for this to accurately represent the actual vector field). This will then turn into a real-time nearest-neighbor problem with rapid and numerous queries.
I'm not sure if these are the only two solutions for this problem, and if these can be done in real-time at all. How should I go about solving this?