Know of any 'off-the-peg' animated water fountains?

[tricky]

Anyone know of any good libraries of animated water fountains? Just simple vertical jets - nothing fancy, but it would be nice if I can just drop them into my scene. Please don't mention RPC

[kiteman]

Check this one.

http://www.fountain-tools.com/index2...ortfolio_video

Regards.

[tricky]

Yep - saw those. To be honest, they look a bit crap and it just seems a bit expensive to me. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to pay for something, but I'm not wholly convinced by f-tools. Have you tried them?

[kiteman]

Yes, I agree with you, it really is not very good. I thought that you may serve some distant scene.
I have not come to try it. If you know of a good thing tell me ok? I am also interested.

Greetings.

[tricky]

Yes, I agree with you, it really is not very good. I thought that you may serve some distant scene.
I have not come to try it. If you know of a good thing tell me ok? I am also interested.

Greetings.

Will do. Very annoying this....

[Neilg]

You can make one in particle flow that renders really nicely with motion blur within a few hours of trial & error - once made it's a question of merging in, moving and keyframing the speed. I cant exactly share it but we've got one which looks really good set up that way.

Keep it to rendering on black and composting though, it's not worth trying to render them in scene.

[tricky]

You can make one in particle flow that renders really nicely with motion blur within a few hours of trial & error - once made it's a question of merging in, moving and keyframing the speed. I cant exactly share it but we've got one which looks really good set up that way.

Keep it to rendering on black and composting though, it's not worth trying to render them in scene.

Thanks for tip. The main problem is I have absolutely no skills/experience with PFlow. I will seek out a tutorial if I get a chance. You know how it is though - stacks to do and no time to learn! I'd be happy to pay for an off the shelf product, but I cannot believe that nothing really exists.

[Neilg]

For a fountain in particle flow all you need is the source, set the intensity/speed, point it where you want it to go and add a gravity force. You can also add a collision operator if you need it (either as a plane or low res geometry). It's probably the simplest thing you can do in pflow.
From then on it's just playing with the material and setting the motion blur to get a nice look. if you can, do as much as possible in post to it to save time.

edit:
http://www.youtu.be/watch?v=ZdQannsUGVA&feature=related
goes into more detail on the splashes that i've ever bothered to do.

[tricky]

For a fountain in particle flow all you need is the source, set the intensity/speed, point it where you want it to go and add a gravity force. You can also add a collision operator if you need it (either as a plane or low res geometry). It's probably the simplest thing you can do in pflow.
From then on it's just playing with the material and setting the motion blur to get a nice look. if you can, do as much as possible in post to it to save time.

edit:
http://www.youtu.be/watch?v=ZdQannsUGVA&feature=related
goes into more detail on the splashes that i've ever bothered to do.

I've been giving this a try in a spare hour. Actually pretty good. However, having got my fountain looking nice (in the viewport at least - haven't got onto renering yet!), I realise I have to have the fountains already running in frame 1. I therefore set the Birth start frame to frame -25. For some reason, this makes the partcles splurge much higher into the air! I'm trying to solve this now, but is it safe to have the Emit Start frame before zero?

I need a whole bunch of fountains. I presume I can just copy these fountains around once I have them looking good? It would be nice if I could have each one slightly different. I will look into how to do that later!

[jacksc02]

Hi Richard,
There are no problems starting at -25.
You can add a noise map to the emitter to help randomise the apperance of the fountains if you are copying them multiple times.
Another thing you can do is just have the 1 particle source but use multiple "emitting" sources.
Simple huh?

[jacksc02]

Post up or email me a screen grab of your pflow and I can help you with the "splurge"

[chriserskine]

in the past i've done simple particle flow fountains. but I would like to know an easier way to offset timing of each jet. I just ended up doing manually for 20 or so emitters.

it would be nice if i could script. but maybe an animated texture would work?

[tricky]

Post up or email me a screen grab of your pflow and I can help you with the "splurge"

Here's a screen grab of my settings (following the online tutorial). In the VP, it looks quite nice, though I am a bit unsure as to what type of particle shape and size to use, how many particles are necessary, and also, what type of material to apply. I clearly have plenty of testing to try!