Just a place to post fluid tests. If you've got any please feel free to add to this thread. This may help point out what works and what doesn't.

This is just my second experiment with fluids and I am using a very small model to speed up the tests. This has come out much faster than I was anticipating so I have slowed it down to half speed in QT. It's a learning experience.

Click to view attachment
Click to view attachment

Click to view attachment

Render times were about 2 seconds per frame without any rise throughout the rendering.
-----------
Oops! I just checked that and there was in fact a slight increase in render times. It started at less than a second per frame and finished at 2 seconds per frame.

Thats a good example Paul ,looking good

Ooooo.... lava!

Does this new fluid render faster than the old blobbies? Sure sounds that way. Does it get dramatically longer with larger sizes? Would scaling this to a life size volcano be undoable?

Yeah. I should have changed the name. Oh, well.

Much faster! Scaling down the whole set does seem to improve the speed but that is probably because you need less blobbies/fluid particles. At the moment there doesn't appear to be any variation in the size of blobbies. Hopefully that will change. Hmmm... I think I should try two emitters with different properties to see if they retain their original blobby size even when they mix..

Does anyone else think that fluid particles need some name other than blobbies so that they can be differentiated from ...blobbies?
----------
No?
Okay.

This one is a bit better but I have still kept it pretty simple with just a small model and a low number of fluid particles, ( 12,000 to be precise). The blobbies look way too big so I'm going to try scaling up the model and increasing the number of emitters. The settings that I have used are not really suited to creating lava. I am aware of that.
Click to view attachment
Click to view attachment
( I had to render to low res and heavily compress to keep the file size down. It is probably still on the heavy side for many people. Sorry about that).
I have been trying to get particle sprites to work along side fluids but they are not showing up. It's probably just me so I will test a bit more.
--------------
EDIT: Particle sprites have started working now!
--------------
It would be cool if fluid blobbies had a "sag" property so that their shape could be flattened, while keeping the same volume, rather than maintaining a sphere shape. This would help to spread the fluid, creating a more realistic illusion with less particles. Perhaps that is already being considered. (Or maybe it has been tried and rejected because it just didn't look good?).

Awesome stuff, Paul. I'm currently trying to render a transparrent pipesystem, but after 3 hours and 50 minutes of rendering, it's still only showing one big, blank screen. Guess A:M has to calculate this and that. How long did that take you to render out?

About 15 minutes. A VGA version of the same thing took about an hour and was about 9 MB in size.
Four seconds of animation + 2 seconds of preroll.
The render is only 4 seconds and is a low res movie, (320x240), but I have set it to run at half speed and full screen in the QT player.
I am currently rendering something bigger but the file sizes get too large for posting here.

I'm having real problems keeping the blobbies from falling through my terrain models. Increasing the density of the mesh doesn't seem to help. Stevie Wooster mentioned in his tutorial that if even one blobbie is allowed to fall a long way from the camera it will drastically slow the rendering down. Try putting an extra surface/ tray under your model to catch any stray blobbies. That may help your render times.


Stevie has a report on A:M Reports which mentions that fluids do not currently render properly if they are behind a transparent surface. If you are trying to render water flowing through transparent pipes you may be out of luck for the time being.

One last render until I have something more convincing.
This is probably the nicest to look at so far but even though I have set the size of the blobbies to 1cm and redusced blobbiness to 1% they still clump together in rather large balls. I'm pretty sure that if I scale the model up quite a bit that the water will start to look better. At the moment this model is only 2m x 2m.
(Once again, sorry for the file size. I will delete all these test movies in a week or two.)

Click to view attachment

The render that I have going on the other machine is a test of fluids to create a flowing creek but at the moment it looks like an avalanche.

Nice tests Paul. The last one kind of looked like an avalanche

I know, I've tried a similiar project before, but I was currious only to see how it reacted when "flushed" trough a pipe. I watched the similation in wireframe-mode and it looked like a lot of blobs were escaping the pipe. I wanted to render it to see how much fluid actually escaped.

EDIT: On the 7th hour of rendering. Still not a single frame >.<

I have put a request in to A:M Reports to ask for some way to get A:M to automatically turn off particles when a render has completed or when a render is aborted. I am finding it takes an extremely long time to get control of my computer back after a render and much of that time seems to be taken up by A:M recalculating the particles for the real time display. With fluids it will often be necessary to have many seconds of prerender time to set everything up for the first frame. At the moment it takes my machines ages to recover after rendering fluids and then, as soon as I close the render window, it goes into recalculating the particles for frame 0 and won't allow me to turn particles off until it has completed this task that I didn't want it to do in the first place.This wasted time, sometimes more than an hour, could be avoided by just turning particles off when someone presses "Escape" and when a render finishes.

Does this seem logical or am I missing something important here?

That seems reasonable...can't speak for the PROGRAMMING involved to do such a thing...but it would help in other ways, like with Hair as well...

Earlier you asked if this should have a different name than 'blobbies' and ...seems it DOES.... FLUID.

Heh. Yes. I guess I'll just refer to a fluid blobbie as a fluid blobbie... or a fluid particle.

Sounds like a good idea. But as ever, it should be optional.

Flobbie or Flubbie ?

When I have a render done and the render window is showing the results, I go to the options menu and turn off particle in the render options, before closing the render window.

Shift 8 turns off all particles and hair I did that a number of times while playing with the new particles

Just a tiny question... How would one be able to "bind" the properties of a material to a pose slider? Say you want to control the initial velocity and rate of emition in order to make, say, a gun that shoots water.

J

Doh! I feel so deflated. Thanks guys! Why have I never tried that? I always see the greyed out particle button on my tool bar and assume the command is inaccessable.
Big thanks from the incredible shrinking man!

It's about time for me to give these tests a rest but before I do here is what the fluid looks like when I scale the mountain up to 20 metres x 20 metres:
Click to view attachment
Click to view attachment
Click to view attachment
This is another low res movie and it took about two hours to render these four seconds plus 8 seconds of preroll to get the water flowing first.
Once again heavily compressed then expanded and slowed in QT. A higher quality render came in at about 97MB.

Well, back to my projects. A:M fluid looks very promising indeed.

that is sooooo FUN! what promise, double indeed!

Paul, you know Super can compress and adjust frame rate in one encode right?

Looks good. It reminds me of the Cascades Technical Demo put out by NVIDIA. When they had their water running over the surface, it dynamically put down specular textures, so you could use something like Painter to paint the wet parts of the mountain.

Please enlighten me, Matt!
I'm pretty ignorant about the enormous variety of codecs out there now. Or are you just talking about adjusting the frame rate and saving out as QT again? Is this QT method causing viewing problems? I would like to know if there is a better and more economical solution. Maybe I should start using DivX.
I have Super but haven't used it beyond one initial test. I will take a look.

The dynamic specular painter sounds cool but it wouldn't be too difficult to paint them in using low quality renders like these as a reference to the paths the water takes, especially if I purchased Pixosaur.

Thanks.

Anyone? Material properties + Pose slider = ? In plain english: can you make a pose slider adjust material properties, like initial velocity for the fluid emitter?

Btw, looking very good Paul

Sorry, Mr. Jage, I didn't mean to ignore you. I don't have the definitive answer for you. I would have to test it but you may be able to do it with expressions, driving a fluid property by adjusting a pose slider, but you will have to wait for an answer from someone who really knows, or until I am curious enough to go and test it for myself.
Hopefully someone else will know for sure.

By all means, I didn't feel ignored... Ok, so I did, but I'm a very attention-sick person at times But yeah, I tried tinkering with it for a while, but gave up after two hours and zero result to show for x.x Guess we'll have to wait

J

There is no reason to control the initial velocity with a pose slider because you can just as easily adjust those variables under the choreographies advanced material options on your emitter model.

Here's a movie of just that:
Click to view attachment

Just click the Show More than Drivers icon next to the models in the choreography window to get to those variables. This one adjusted the rate of emission. Here's the project file if you want to take a look at it:
Click to view attachment

Paul, Super can do both Apple and Windows codecs, so you can have DivX QT encoding as well, or make it any other animation media format with several selections for sound, frame rate, aspect ratio, bit rate, ect. Just drop the video into the bottom list box, choose the settings you want to play at (.mov with DivX is what I normally use to put videos on the forum), and encode.

15 alpha
This is PREVIEW render (It is frame number 100)
Click to view attachment
BUT!
I cannot receive liquid refract behind a wall of a glass when I do RENDER TO FILE


project:
Click to view attachment

Very cool.

I believe that the liquid behind transparency issue has been reported. I remember reading that on one of the threads here in v15.

Wow! Great Pour! Paul...your tests are awesome too! How did you make that mountain?

My Fluid tests are going smoothly...working well...nothing fancy enough to show yet, but I WILL report that the render times are indeed a LOT less that what we all initially expected... WHEW! And the cool thing to remember IS... Martin and crew are JUST STARTING on this feature... there's still a LONG time to develope it, so they are sitting pretty. I'm SURE they love seeing these tests tho-

Thnx again Matt, works like a charm!

J

One of the GREAT advancements in A:M over the last year, as far as I am concerned, is the Terrain Wizard. It makes terrain modelling a breeze. Just paint yourself a small greyscale displacement map, import it into the terrain wizard, set the grid dimensions and let it generate a mesh from your map. It is superb!
This mountain is only a quick example. If you spend some time on all the various maps you can produce something beautiful.


Well, I'm not so sure about that. We're not even supposed to talk about it are we?

I look forward to seeing what you come up with, Matt.

Nice test, Serg2. I would like to see it with more passes though.

SO---That greyscale displace map should be 16 bit...right?

Paul,

I am really digging those fluid tests you posted. By all means, if I may, please continue posting your research and tests here. This is the kind of thing that is so great about this forum, choosing a topic in Animation Master and studying it in detail. Very cool stuff.

Joe.

I'll have to find some time to play too.

Great tests everybody, they look awesome!

Matt, 8-bit is fine. It's a terrain not a detailed face map. You will probably want to push and pull some of the CPs around before you settle on a final model anyway. The terrain wizard just gets you most of the way there very quickly. Then you can scale the model, edit it and then get into painting your other maps.


Thanks, Joe. I'll certainly add to this when I do some more fluid tests but for now I have other things to get on with.


Yes. You certainly will, Mark. Water would look great in some of your landscapes.

Decided to tinker a bit, myself.Click to view attachment
Just can't seem to shake that "gooey-pebbles" or "tiny rocks mixed into fluid" feel.
Certainly doesn't move like I expect wine to move.
Has anyone managed to get a smooth twisting stream out of this instead of little globs?
Perhaps if the particles stretched in the line of the motion vector? Or spread out along the contours of a surface?
(I'm no computer scientist, that is for sure, so who knows if any of that is possible.)

Excellent progress thus far, and looking promising, nonetheless.

v15 is looking to be another grand-slam release year. (Every year is, it seems.)

Fluid.... Mmmmm, makes me thirsty!
I had to do a test myself. What a great feature! Kudos to Hash. Thanks

Click to view attachment


Click to view attachment

I'm loving all these colorful liquids - makes me wonder if it's possible to do color changes over time and end up with rainbow colored goo?

I haven't had a chance to play yet.

Jesse, that looks like cranberries that turn to juice after you fill your glass. Fresh!
So far I have found scale to be the biggest factor in getting the blobbies to form sheets rather than blobs. Large sets and props so the camera is farther away. Also surface tension and blobbiness are probably important but I haven't tested enough to say how much each value plays in breaking down the blobs into flowing sheets. I keep both low for less blobiness.
---------
Edit: Another factor is time. It seems that it takes time for the blobbies to melt into one another so if you want to avoid pouring cranberries you may need a deeper jug or a longer pipe or more preroll.
---------

Stian, you seem to have found the right settings. That is a nice flowing fluid and no leaking pipes. Has any of the fluid leaked inside the model, between the two skins?

Can you tell us how tall that model is, how small the blobbies are and how long that took to render?

These tests are so cool. I hope we get the option to have this "blobby look" still when it gets more "watery" looking.

The emitter is the same as the one from the tutorial. I've only changed the color. I did see some fluid leaks earlier on when the walls in the tap was a little thinner (at this point they are 2cm thick). The model is 4,5m high.


Here is the projectfile:
Click to view attachment

Hi... made a test too...
Renderingtimes where at the beginning very very promising and went up than to a higher value... 2sec - 10 minutes a frame at the end.

Interesting: What really takes time is not the Particle / Fur-Calculation but the Patch-Visibility... is that the time the "surface" of the Fluids is calculated?

*Fuchur*

PS: Just to mention: I am using a quite old PC.... Athlon XP 2000+, 768 MB RAM.

Oh. I forgot to mention the rendertime for my test. 1sec-45sec each frame, and I didnt think that was bad at all (but then again I'm used to work with 10hour still frames ). I'm not sure, but I think it is the refraction that is increasing the rendertime.

I did a new test and animated some of the attributes...
The most noticeable change can be seen at the fluids-size...

*Fuchur*

You mentioned the Patch-Visibility delay I did also and noticed it was higher when the emiter was on a separate model placed inside another model in the chor

Question for Martin or Stevie Wooster :

Heavy Metal or Drool?

In my tests with A:M15 alpha01 I have been attempting to create a liquid that runs down a vertical surface in much the way that you would expect from something like washing up liquid. Thick and sticky.
Click to view attachment
There doesn't seem to be a property to give the liquid any adhesion to the surface on which it is running. Are there any plans to add this adhesion, (stickyness), and also perhaps elasticity to the properties of A:M liquid? If so are they likely to appear in the near future? I need to make a decision about which way to go with a current project.

Thanks for any advice.
-------------
I think I may just model and rig it this time to ensure that I have total control of it's glutinous mass.

Yes, you should model it...
I think you can adjust the power of the gravity so... that should improve it a bit...
A:M Fluids are at the beginning till now... A:M v15 alpha is the first one which uses it so I am quite sure it will become better and better... Maybe Stevie will add other attributes in the futur releases of A:M...

*Fuchur*

Try messing with the slide and surface tension. These should allow you the slow slide and tacky feel your looking for.

So I am. Just starting. I will make a pose slider to adjust various states of drip. This is just dynamics at the moment.


Not sure what the slide property is. I haven't seen that one yet. I will investigate.

Thanks, guys!

Current drool without fluid:
Click to view attachment
Yes, I know it looks like Christmas decorations at the moment.