Researchers at the Australian research agency CSIRO decided to spend the next 4 years developing software tools that will allow animators to create more realistic movement of water for movies and video games.

Something quite complicated for the moment, since you have to know exactly the movement of the liquid, the behaviour of foam, bubbles, splashes, waves, eddies, and whirlpools.

Foam and bubbles? Yes, we told you that those researchers were australian. Belgian researchers would do the same: first, they will simulate the pouring of beer in a glass.

They hope finishing this before the end of this year.
Before that, they simulated the sinking of the Titanic as an example of animated motion of water: complicated mathematical algorithms to calculate the behavior of flowing water, which was then rendered in software for simulating the motion of different objects.

Resolution is a big concern because if it's too poor, the animated fluid would resemble flowing ice. The researchers solved this problem by using Computational Fluid Dynamics, which gave animators control of every particle in the fluid.
Here is a video about that.


Source: The Age, two weeks ago.
For those who do not know: The Titanic is a too long movie of James Cameron.