Experiment | Fluid Simulation | 01
Conclusion
Here is a fluid simulation using x-particles. In this experiment I explored a few components to see how X-particles merge into our current preferred production pipeline methods.
Can X-particles be used effectively with Corona Renderer. Because of its beautiful results, ease of use, and reliable performance, a lot of our visualisation is output using the Corona render engine. It has a been an important factor in progressing our exploration of X-particles. This sequence, although brief and in need of some tweaking, shows some promising signs.
Will the render farm have any issues with unsupported plugins? Recently we have had some integration issues between our render farm and the use of X-particles. Thankfully the guys at Rebus Farm are a very helpful bunch and work with you to fault find and repair the issues as quickly as possible
To output a fluid simulation which Corona Renderer can control the particle system has to be skinned. This is a mesh created to wrap around the particles. The mesh can then be manipulated to refine the smoothing and offset values of the mesh being created.
In this scene I took advantage of the xpOVDBMesher generator to create the mesh. This gave me a surface which I could apply a Corona material to.
To get the particles to flow across the surface was a straight forward process. A simple terrain object which remained procedural for the whole process, which is assigned to an XP follow on surface modifier.
Of course we suffer the same old issue with the MoText object, Rebus Farm will not accept any live type, so everything text wise has to be made editable!
Fluid simulation or fluid dynamics are tricky systems to control, they require a fairly hefty amount of particles to begin with or produce and you also need a large amount of RAM to have a decent playback. Even when cached to external file this system struggled to playback in realtime. That in its self causes an issue when setting up the fluid simulation and trying to ascertain how it will play.
This is further compounded by the size of voxels I can work with in the mesher. The voxel size 2.6 if I lower this value much further the redraw is too long to make a useable file.
I think with my current Mac setup; iMacRetina 5k from late 2014 it would be challenging to recreate fluids such as water. It will however be good for more viscous materials such as paints or liquid metals. Time to think about an upgrade!
