Planetary and oceanic simulation software?

**AtomicClock** · March 11th, 2011

I hope the title wasn't confusing.
Basically, I'm looking to simulate liquid distribution on a simulated terrestrial planet, in 3 dimensions.

To be more precise: I would like to model the Earth's shape, including mountains, and simulate the current oceans, also. The next goal would be to alter the terrain of the planet (making mountains shorter, and oceanic trenches higher; basically, perform an iterative equalization of land height), and simulate what the oceans would appear like after that (while maintaining the same volume of water).

I don't have much experience in any scientific tools, really, although I have played with Blender a bit, and I would be more than willing to learn something new. Would a task like this be feasible? Would Blender be able to do something like this? Is there another program that would do it easier, or better?

Thank you all for any suggestions.

**nickleboyblue** · March 11th, 2011

look for blender water simulations on youtube. You'll be surprised by what you find. Doing that on the scale of a planet would require an array of supercomputers unless you seriously simplify the physics model and essentially create a ball the size of a basketball to run the simulation on. It can be done in blender, though it requires a good deal of knowledge about scripting.

**AtomicClock** · March 12th, 2011

Originally Posted by nickleboyblue

look for blender water simulations on youtube. You'll be surprised by what you find. Doing that on the scale of a planet would require an array of supercomputers unless you seriously simplify the physics model and essentially create a ball the size of a basketball to run the simulation on. It can be done in blender, though it requires a good deal of knowledge about scripting.

Ouch. I was afraid of that.
Hmm, but I suppose that if Blender is up for the job, I may as well give it a shot. Thanks for the tip!

**yourwhiteshadow** · March 14th, 2011

Originally Posted by AtomicClock

Ouch. I was afraid of that.
Hmm, but I suppose that if Blender is up for the job, I may as well give it a shot. Thanks for the tip!

or amazon's EC2 instead of the array of supercomputers. i'm not familiar with blender though, so i'm not 100% sure how much resources it would need. but if you run into rendering problems because of resources, then check out amazon's EC2 service.