Beading water droplets

[squintnic]

I am trying to create lots of beaded water droplets held by surface tension on a hard, smooth surface.

Some problems:

The fluid is drifting to +X for no reason I can discern, even running uphill.

The volume of fluid emitted is way more than should be emitted in one frame from a very small object with a discharge of .001 - how do I reduce it?

Fluid is left on the emitter (which sits just above the surface) until it shrinks away to nothing

I wanted to use a particle system as the emitter, this seems to be very unstable. It either does not work at all or gives unpredictable results such as ignoring the animated discharge parameter.

I would like to have some of the droplets stick to the surface. I can't find a parameter that controls friction - the velocity multiplier in the phoenixFD properties seems ineffective even when set to zero. Preferably this would be an attribute that could be controlled by a map.


Any help pointing me in the right direction is much appreciated.

[Ivaylo Katev]

i will not lie to you - as i know there is no liquid simulator that gives good result for droplets over hard surface. i'm searching periodically for such simulations but didn't find any. all the animations of droplets moving on surface are made by particle flow or thinking particles, or any other particle tools, and the static images (widely used in the advertisement) are made directly by displaced geometry, without any particles or other dynamics.

[nicsquint]

Surely these issues are not all unique to creating water droplets, the most bizarre being fluid moving against gravity, but also being able to control the emission amount with any sort of accuracy or using particles as an emission source.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

It doesn't sound well. Would it be possible to attach a (stripped) version of your scene or to send it to support@chaosgroup.com for investigation?

[nicsquint]

bizarrely, I reopened the file to package up to send and a lot of the anomalies were gone (I have screen grabs to prove I'm not insane) this is not to say they won't be back again at some time But there are still some persistent issues.

file sent, I hope we can sort this - as much as I gripe, Phoenix is pretty damn cool.

[Ivaylo Katev]

the surface tensions drift is a known issue, the grid platform is just not very well for such kind of effects, that's why we are working on the particle solver. we will check the source behavior of your scene to see what is the problem here.

[nicsquint]

ah, good to know I'm not crazy.