I’m working with liquid in a cyclone simulation. In the end, the main flow should come out through the outlet on top, while heavy fraction containing minerals should fall at the bottom outlet. The fluid is non newtonian. It’s not easy to configure the fluid to climb up on center. The physics behind the phenomena is that when going down, the fluid picks up the speed and start rising in the middle, where’s less resisting pressure. Heavy particles cannot climb up so they fall towards bottom outlet. I started to get some results, when I reduced the gravity to the value of 0.1.
Or maybe I should try smoke instead of liquid in the simulation.
How about if you use the Particle Tuner. Maybe you can make the heavy particles one color and the light ones another and pushe them around in different sides using the Tuner.
I’m testing this right now. Anyway, I’m using tyFlow particles and two-way simulation. I try to get the stone particles fall at the lowest point just before the liquid starts to rise upwards in the center of the cyclone. I’ll let You know what happened. I’m using a spiral as the initial path. I might not be able to use particle age, since the particles should follow the stream that fall to bottom pipe.
One thing I was thinking; would it make sense to have a smoke simulation inside of the liquid to show how it’s moving? When system is filled with liquid, the movement cannot be observed. It look like it’s tumbling on spot.
It seems a bit better now. However, I can’t see the liquid going up in the middle. Also the spiral rounds are detached. Is it the pipe radius, I need to increase?
For controlling where certain portion of the particles should go - check the videos on the Particle Tuner I shared above.
What do you mean that the spiral rounds are detached - you wish the liquid to strictly follow the spline? You can use the force preview in the Preview rollout and pick the Path follow in order to visualize how it will affect the sim - then it should be easier to dial down the pipe radius.
To make sure I was wondering if we are referring to same particles. I’m talking about tyFlow particles. I’m trying to remove stones from non newtonian fluid.
The fluid should be going down while accelerating. Then on bottom it should turn upwards in the middle. However stones being heavy don’t go up, they keep on falling.
Edit: By looking at preview, I noticed, my path is reversed. Now doing yet another version after cancelling that.
Regarding paths, are multiple splines allowed per Path follow force? In the next phase I should combine streams from three different emitters apart from each other.
Yes I managed, I just reversed the spline. At the moment I’m simulating the next phase where I would need to simulate the results of this cyclone events (there’s total three cyclones). There I would really need multiple paths.
Is this multispline support coming to R4, or do I need to start counting pennies (which I don’t have), to get R5?
I had yesterday meeting with the client. They told me to make big changes on simulation results - almost nothing is correct in the current simulation. I think I’m back at square one. Any ideas for totally new way to solve this? Is there a way to improve Phoenix fluid dynamic results? Anyway, my current results are the ones, that don’t explode whole system. Change a tiny bit and Phoenix will explode all over the place.
I don’t know what simulator they are using, but their simulations are much more physically correct.
On the screenshot below You can see, that the liquid starts going up at wrong place. In real world it goes all the way down and then most of it starts going up in the middle, while small amount of it goes to pipe down and flushes the particles there. The particles should stay inside the liquid and stop acting like a string of pearls outside of it. The movement of liquid is way too slow.
Actually, it seems I’m after all running Phoenix 5. On license manager there’s Phoenix universal. I didn’t realize it means R5. So I’ll download the latest nightly to see if it makes any difference. Anyway I have long way to go to get acceptable results with my simulation.
I just installed it and waiting to see first results tomorrow.
Also, I have one question. As we know when rendering moving liquid, it’s impossible to see it moving since. I was thinking if it’s possible to render the same liquid simulation with smoke settings. I think it’s easier to see how it’s moving. If so, what would be the best practice for that?
The multi spline support is already in the latest update of Phoenix 5.10. No need to use a nightly, just get the latest build from the chaos.com download section.
As for rendering liquid as smoke - you can pick the liquid particles in a Particle shader and render them as Fog - but this won’t make the simulation behave like smoke though - it will just be rendered as volume - so it’s best to try if this works for your scene.
The other option would be to make an additional smoke simulation and then render it together with the liquid.
Regarding smoke, I was thinking it would make the liquid movement more visible. At the moment, liquid voxels are moving quite fast in the system, but in rendered animation they seem to be tumbling on spot. What if I add a copy and render it as smoke inside the liquid?
At my latest simulation the things are going a bit worse on particle point of view. Is there any ideas on how I can have a better distribution inside the fluid.
