I can''t get water to look like water at all+tons of bubbles and glass like appearance

[vanja_kapetanovic]

Hey guys I am trying to make a scene of a giant tsunami wave coming down onto a city. I am trying by having huge object emit liquid towards the city model or Initial Fill Up 25 percent and than dropping something huge to cause this wave. However I have really hard time getting any water realism. It looks like glassy, blobby mess no matter how fine resolution I put or If I put 1 or 10 steps for smoothness.. Also bubbles are like 10 feet big. I try to do scale appropriate scene. Like my length is around 150 meters which is decently big so I guess my wave would be like 30 meters tall. so my measures add up I would say. I am not sure but foam setting just gives me 0 foam and ton of bubbles. With fire/smoke sims I am able to get some pretty good looking stuff quick but water is a nightmare. How do you get a realistic looking water like ocean? I did follow tutorial for infinite ocean and that's fine for a static shots but I need this water moving and looking like a real sea crumbling down not like a water from a hose or something. I cranked all the foam settings, 0 foam. Not sure how you get foam here. I will never use bubbles probably I didn't even see button that says bubbles as I wan't to shute them off but Idk what's causing any of this. so I got no clue where are the bubbles even coming from. If anyone knows how to do realistc water or if there is a preset I'd love to use it. It's extremely hard to set up so If I ever find a prset I will never start from scratch. Also color or Shader for water can be either see through or too dark. I am not able to get realistic looking color or refraction either. And also surface of my water is glass smooth. Doesn't reassamble water at all so please any help is appreciated

[squintnic]

where are your test renders and set up?

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Yes, please, please share a screengrab of your Simulator settings rollouts and the results you are getting, and we will be able to help in a much more efficient way. A picture is worth a thousand words

[vanja_kapetanovic]

Hey guys so sorry I keep forgetting to share screen shots so here they are. Please bare with me I am a Phoenix FD beginner and I know what this program is capable of. That IS the part of my frustration. I know it's all my error that it looks like crap because I know this program is killer !!!
Here's my little proxy, place holder of the city scape (just some boxes for now). And than giant box to emit the water and wave should come crashing down on the city as I said.

[vanja_kapetanovic]

And few more

[vanja_kapetanovic]

Also I used HDRI to try to add some realism into the lighting but that's obviously at this point least of my worries

Also ALSO it might be worth mentioning that this video sparked my idea and kind of achieved what I am going for. I think this person's final result would be great if water was slower and gave impression of immense size rather than just spilling a bucket of water over toy city but at least his idea and water texture is what I tried to go after. He's got all this foam going in his video yet I have 0 foam. Not little or less...I have 0 foam. It's not even showing. It looks in a particle preview mode as If I have tooons of foam. Then I it render and it looks like glass or jelly but definitely 0 foam.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ay_nhTCrPY&t=703s

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Oh, this video uses Phoenix 2 which still used the fire/smoke solver to create liquid. Some of the options would produce similar results, but some will not.

So your simulator scale is good. The grid resolution is way too low - at 1 million voxels you might not be getting a good idea of how the simulation will behave when you raise the resolution later. I suggest you boost this to around 10 million using the 'Increase Resolution' button.

Next some the large bubbles you mention - I suppose these might be the Splash particles. Their sizes come from the size of the simulation grid, so when you raise the grid resolution, the Splash sizes will go down. You can find more about them here: https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/...plash+%7C+Mist

The Foam Birth Threshold seems very high, so probably this is why you are not getting any Foam created. Your threshold says 50 meter/sec, so roughly speaking, the liquid must move faster than this for foam to start getting born. Since the Grid rollout says your simulator is 200 meters long, this means that foam will be born when the liquid moves so quickly that it travels the whole sim in 4 seconds from end to end. You can find more about the Foam Birth threshold, as well as check some videos comparing settings here: https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/PHX4MAX/Liquid+Foam

I see one more thing that might be misleading you - you have set both Foam and Splash particles to render as Splashes. Note that when a Liquid Simulator is connected, particles will not render as Splashes when they are inside the liquid volume of the Liquid Simulator. This is because Splashes represents small liquid droplets used to add more detail to the Liquid mesh, so it does not make sense to render them underwater. So this might be the reason you are not seeing foam particles which are inside the liquid. I suggest you use the Bubbles or Points particle shader modes for the Foam particles instead.

Hope this helps!

[vanja_kapetanovic]

Svetlin.Nikolov Thank you so much for breaking this down Svetlin. I have a pretty decent gaming computer with 64 RAM , NVidia 2080 and Ryzen 9th gen proc. But still I hear that a good practice is to use LOW RES sim to get the motion and physics right. Jess Pitela pretty much says that every time in his tutorials "Get the scale right, than simulate with low res to see the motion". Which granted are good habits but in thsi case prevents me from seeing if I will get foam and how much in my render. That is the reason for my low res. I didn't know if it wiill take me all night to sim this huge wave just to see the foam next day or maybe not even at all so I wasn't gonna risk it but I knew that resolution of my grid is waaaay too low for this task. I will go and study FOAM and SPLASH functions now the way you explained them and from the manual and try to see what can I come up with and I will share the render and the settings. Obviously I cranked up the FOAM BIRT TRESHOLD because I forgot trashols work always in reverse. Higher the nmber less of the thing you want and smaller the number more of the thing you want. I don't know how did I miss the word "treshold". I though let me bump up everyything, splashes, foam , mist , bubbles, because I haven't seen any of them hahaha so I just went full on meathead mode and just tried to ramp it all up which consequently led to even less desired effect.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Fingers crossed! When changing the resolution, the sim will start getting different, so for some scenes you can do something else - have the cell size like for the final sim, but make the simulator narrower. In your setup I think you can do that and get the exact same behavior of the foam and splash like the final sim, but at reduced simulation times.