Liquid Surface Stepping

Hello!
Its been a hot minute since I last used Phoenix FD but I’m trying to pick it up again.
I’ve encountered a small thing in my testing though, the surface of the liquid seems to be “stepping” rather harshly. The centre portion of the liquid is taller than the rest, probably because there is more liquid there etc, however instead of smoothly transitioning it makes a small “Step” in the liquid surface that looks rather uncharming.

I’m already at 12 sub-frame samples and 60M grid points/voxels/cells and the problem has not really changed.
The images below are just quick renders at low res from my testing, some have high surface tension, some have a really low surface tension etc.

Thank you so much for your time! Any advice is appreciated!



Hey,

This is because you have one layer of FLIP particles at the low points and two layers at the higher ones. The only things you could try are:
- Increasing the grid resolution.
- Grid Channel Smoothing from the Input rollout.
- Mesh Smoothing from the Rendering rollout.

Cheers!

Hello!
Thanks for the quick response!

Tried your suggestions but it does not seem to have a large impact on the mesh it still seems to be “stepping”.

I increased the cell count to about 80M, tried to use the broadest possible spectre for the input smoothing and added an iteration of render smoothing but the “stepping” still seems as defined.

Now if we assume that I am not as familiar with all the tech terms from Phoenix or liquid sims in general (I’m not :roll_eyes:), what did you mean when you said I have one layer of particles at the low point and two layers at the higher ones?
Just that the high points/stepped areas of the mesh are two FLIP particles tall or is there some tech term here that I do not know? :face_with_spiral_eyes:

Thank you for your help!

Hey,
The lower level of the mesh has a single layer of particles where the higher one has more.
What if you add more render smoothing and play around with the Particle size?

If it’s possible would you please send us the scene to see what’s going on?

I did try working with mesh smoothing while testing the input smoothing aswell but it did not seem to have a large effect. But I did not really look into the particle size too much so I’ll give that a shot!
Thanks

Will do, here you go!

(Here is a link to my cache aswell if it is desired, this is however the lower grid size cache)

Only change I’ve done to the file here is that I have turned off the input smoothing and lowered the grid size to make it easier to itterate on for now.

Thanks for the replies guys!

Hey,
Thanks a lot for the scene.
In the Dynamics rollout - change the Droplet Breakup to 1 and you should be good to go.
You can find more about how the Surface tension works here - Chaos Docs

Ahh! Thank you very much good sir! All nice and smooth. Suspected there was something I was doing wrong :roll_eyes:

Well then, case solved!

Thanks for the help!
And thanks to all who took time to reply!