I’m currently trying to animate some shallow fluids, with ripples due to ground shake (think Jurassic Park, cup of water and an approaching T-rex etc).
Probably the easiest way to get ripples like that is not a fluid simulation, but dynamic paint. Here’s an example file. There’s a subdivided plane on layer one set as a canvas with the Waves surface type. Tucked away on another layer is a UV sphere which won’t render for the camera. It’s set as a brush and keyframed to drop straight down through the center of the plane. Hit play to see what happens. ripples.blend (886 KB)
Took me all of two minutes to make this, unlike the days it would take to get a fluid simulation to do the same thing just right. If you want some splashing, you can add a particle system to this, but for ripples in a shallow fluid that’s probably unnecessary.
Thank you for taking the time to put up your .blend there.
I suspected there were good “faking it” alternatives for some of what I was doing.
What little I’d seen of Dynamic Paint implied a flat animated texture effect. I did not expect the displacement there! Very Nice.
My target situation will be more complex, but I’ll see if I can develop this basic idea further. Even if it is only used for some shots it will reduce baking time etc considerably as you pointed out. Perhaps I will just use fluidsim for the bigger “out of container” splashes.
Just returning to my original question - any idea how we access:
Channels do not appear in the graph editor until you insert a single keyframe. After that the channel becomes available for further keyframing or modifier manipulation of the current value.
Ah, you have uncovered a bit of out-of-date documentation. Where it says “Ipo window” it really ought to say “Graph Editor.” And the behavior of the Graph Editor is a bit different than this page claims. If you want to animate one of those values, hover your mouse over it in the Properties Window and hit IKEY to add a keyframe. Then go to the Graph Editor and you can edit that property’s F-Curve. http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Animation/Editors/Graph/FCurves
Also I think those particular properties of a fluid simulation are a little out of date too. Viscosity is controlled under the Fluid World panel and has a base and an exponent, both of which can be animated. I think you already know where to find the time settings, and gravity is controlled through the world gravity settings.
@Atom:
Thanks. Yes, I’d heard that an inital bit of keyframing would bring my object into the editor. But accessing seemingly unreachable channels was still a problem, hence I came here.
@K Horseman:
That makes a lot of sense. As I said, I’d been using “I-key” to get channels into the editor, but these fancy values didn’t seem to be on offer in the fluidsim/physics context.
So - each of those values is accessed elsewhere in Blender, but using the same method. Gotcha.