Understanding wind tunnel results

Wrongfire

Hello! Im new and recently figured out how to make wind tunnels in 3ds max and Maya.

Im helping to develop a sci-fi game and just out of curiosity took one of our space ship models meant for space to planet travel into the wind tunnel to see if it would really be able fly, and if not, find out what changes I can make to make it aerodynamic.

So this isn't overly important, but I would like to discuss and learn about aerodynamics, now that I can visually experiment with it, ive gained an interest in learning as much as I can.
First off, I need to understand what good and bad results are when running wind tunnel tests.

Anyway, Here is the video with a few quick runs in wind tunnel.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfwxM6bi0Oo

Im curious if the ship is capable of lift, im also wondering what to look for in these simulations to tell me if is or not.

boneh3ad

You haven't given nearly enough info on the ship to determine if it can create lift. Furthermore, the simulations look like they are just ordinary particle effects, which don't actually model fluids as well as they appear. You can't get any quantitative or even likely qualitative data from this. If you could, people wouldn't be making 6 figures to grid up and run CFD simulations.

Wrongfire

Ahh, was afraid of that. I looked around for a wind tunnel simulator but, and I guess thats why they make the big bucks, they aren't very public.

boneh3ad

They are public, just expensive. It is called computational fluid dynamics and it is very resource intensive for th big jobs. Depending on the level of detail required, it may even require a supercomputer.