Looking for Suggestions for Liquids..

[dbuchhofer]

Howdy, Have a few interesting water related projects that would be much more interesting if we take them to the next level!

Main question, How is Liquid simulation generally done?

As of now, I only see a few options.. I'm hoping you folks can point me in the right direction if there are others

A: Particles.. Normal max particles have the oh so fun metaparticles.. Essentially blobs of goo bouncing around.. Can work for some simple scenes, but look is seeming to be a bit off (Probably just me, I'm a newb at this kinda thing) and its not very fast.. Haven't quite hit the limit on how much is a feasable maximum amount of particles, But i can tell already that its probably going to be hit long before we end up finishing the waterwheel/steam turbine.. insane setup time with the deflectors and a lot of layering/compositing/blurring to get it to look anything decent..


B: Plugins.. I've taken a look at realflow.. And while it looks interesting as a simulation package, it appears to be *extremely* crashable.. Has anyone got any experience of actually using it in a realistic (in terms of detail) scene? The demo wasn't particularly impressive..

C: Afterburn? Volumetric.. looks interesting, dont know anything about it.. Can water sims be done with this?

D: Aura? Any word on when/what? Hopefully will see some nice stuff at siggraph!!

E: Material fakes on reactor softbodys.. A shot in the dark.. Looks like it *could* be possible.. but also looks like it'll be a bit painful to figure out..

F: Your Solution Here..



Not looking for trade secrets here, just trying to get some ideas as to what it is i should be looking at in terms of software/procedure...

[metroberlin]

realflow is my favorit. it crashes sometimes without warning, thats terrible, but in the end realflow has the best results. and you can easily use the generated mesh with max and vray. i love realflow when the animation is done, during the work i hate it )

[Psy]

if you want stability, use realflow 1.33

the new realflow is buggy as hell and crashes far too much to even be considered an option in production work.

[Da_elf]

http://www.gfx-inside.net/lightmesh/

this was very interesting i emailed him a while back but it seems he has made no progress. Send him an email if you want, he seemed friendly. Maybe the chaos group guys can buy his code hehehe

[Solitude]

Glu3d

There's also a new plugin for max called glu3d, and they have a free public beta on their website : http://www.3daliens.com/ looks pretty good, though realflow 2.5 will likely be more advanced. I like the fact that glu3d is all max based, and not a 3rd party program to do the physics and particles and mesh generation... etc...

[percydaman]

ive been playing around with glu3d and its real easy to use. definitely check it out.