Why is this sooo hard?

[Steamheads]

Im trying to replicate the same kind of feel as this little clip. Slow motion, closeup, cream/creme (liquidy but thick). I want the little drop, flip over, the delicate, gracious feeling that this little 10 frames gives.
I have been trying for over a week to get it but cannot seem to replicate anything like it. Im a newbie at phoenix so Im not to used to the settings, but its seems very difficult to get a smooth looking surface, with a little tightening from the churning AND enough looseness to make it flip over a drop. If ANYONE can help me replicate this in phoenix i would be eternally grateful cause this is driving me up the wall.
Maybe im not using high enough resolution but when i get something (with a low res) that looks promising it changes totally when I turn up the res.

I think my main problem is trying to figure out how to get the same movement in the fluid. Ive tried all kinds of objects dropping into the liquid, coming from bellow, hitting it, another fluid hitting a filled fluid and so on and so on.
If anyone has any suggestion let me know

Nils A.
Steamheads Studios

[Ivaylo Katev]

i think really the main point here is how the movement is caused. do you know more about the reference video?
the liquid properties look like some viscosity and surface tension are used, i will try to create a simple setup to see how near i can get.

[Steamheads]

Unfortunately there isnt much from this commercial. Ill see if I can find the whole commercial. I think it was from a commercial for Lancome cushion Miracle, but when I search for it on youtube or vimeo I cannot find it.
I have been struggling myself with what made the movement of this fluid. Ive tried lots of things but it doesnt seem to give me the right feel. My problem is that its always to low res (if I simulate it with higher res I get a totally different solution that does not work. And whenever I increase the res I ALWAYS loose the smoothness of the fluid. It in slow motion so Im not sure what to adjust in the Advection, step frame, and type. In the doc it says that if I do slow motion I have to take the step frame down to half of what It was, but I cant seem to make it work. I never get a nice fluid/smooth solution for Macro/slow motion fluid.

[Steamheads]

Im very close to getting something i like, but i need to slow it down even more. The sim i did now was at 0.5 time scale, but its still to fast. Im going to try the 0.2. I tried to use the input play speed but that just gave me a very weird animation that seemed like it was growing in different speeds. What kind of settings do i use in the input section to slow things down... velocity as interpolation? or...?

[Ivaylo Katev]

better don't use the input play speed to slow down a sequence, use the simulation timescale, you really have to simulate multiple times, but this simulation does not require high resolution and it should be fast.

[Steamheads]

what do u mean simulate multiple times? Do you mean to refine the existing simulation multiple times or do the sim multiple times (new sim) to get the right sim?

[Ivaylo Katev]

to achieve the desired result, you have to change the settings repeatedly and try again to simulate, for example the time scale, you find the simulation too fast, and my suggestion was to simulate with smaller timescale, not to try to use the input play speed, because the play speed slow down is decreasing the quality

[Steamheads]

If I may ask another question . If I simulate a fluid with time scale 1.0 and it looks good but I want it in slow motion. When I then set it to 0.1 and simulate I never get anywhere close to the simulation I had (but in slow mo). Why is that? What is it that I have to change beside the time scale to get the same feel? The Main problem seems to be the turbulence in the water, it becomes very docile, kinda like porridge. What I mean is that when I have a nice splash in 1.0 scale I get a very blobby sim in 0.1. The energy from 1.0 is gone in the slow mo.
I must be doing something wrong. The only thing I have found that I need to change together with the timescale is the step frame, but its not very clear exactly why and how that works. Do I have to change the gravity/sharpness/etc. etc. also?

[Ivaylo Katev]

this is because the simulation step is very important for the simulation and changing the timescale the step is changed too. if the first simulation was made with hight spf it can be decreased to keep the same time step, but in the most cases this is not true, for example if the spf is 20, changing the timescale to 0.1 will produce completely the same result with spf decreased to 2. of course this all is not giving in account the animations in the scene, the animation is another source of differences.

btw, as i promised i will try to produce similar behavior to the one shown in the video, i'm doing it right now, will show the results later

[Ivaylo Katev]

well, here is my result, i'm not sure about the exact liquid behavior that you are pursuing, of course exact copy of the reference movie is impossible.

there is still some small flickering on the curved surfaces, it's a mesher issue and we are working on it.