I’m making this video for a youtube intro for making wargaming terrain and I’m having obvious issues. The reason it is sort of a cutout of a mountain and I’m not focused in to hide the outer edges, is it’s in reference to the model terrain that’ll be featured in the youtube channel.
The video isn’t complete but after the text falls there is an explosion just for the fun of it. Anyway, the biggest issue is the speed of the water as it feels like it is in fast forward. The camera also feels quite erratic and I need to make the speed much more even between bezier points.
Second is that the water itself just does not look very good, even in still shots. I’d like to make it a lot more believable. Any help on how to improve the scene would be very much appreciated. Thanks in advance!
I personally think the water flows too smoothly. And I would add some dirt parts on the rock, just add planes with a dirt material and let them shine through on some areas
The water has too much viscosity/cohesion. I think it is your particle size. I haven’t done many fluid simulations, so I do not know all the settings, but to my eye the water is too “clumpy”.
I would also create 2 or three more “grass objects” and include them in the particle system. The grass is too uniform in colour
The reason why the speed looks fast forward is because you have no motion blur (which is what happens if you speed up a video). Also because of that, our eye can’t follow the drops, which makes it look even faster and more confusing. Aaaand I just realized Blender now supports motion blur on fluid simulations since 2.78 ! How did I miss that ? I was waiting for it for so long ! Well thanks for helping me realize that.
Anyway, you just have to enable motion blur in the Render settings.
You should also increase the fluid’s resolution and tweak some settings to make it look larger scale.
Thanks all for the feedback! I’ll definitly throw in some motion blur then and tweak the vegitation. I added in some rocks to try and make things more turbulant as well, but didn’t help much. Having issues with getting the water more rough looking. I bumped the resolution from 400 to 600 and scaled from 3 meters to 5, which helped a lot and brought the splashing down. However it still has that plasticy fake look to it.
I’d also like the edge of the water to blend into the rock better than it does. I’m thinking to paint it darker along the edges of the water as rock darkens after it has gotten wet, hopefully that helps some. But, again, would be nice to get this a lot more turbulant overall. Maybe some smoke effect would help but my PC is already chugging pretty slow at this point in the scene.
Looking at this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=q4uqn9VWqFQ it would seem I need to drastically increase my floater particle count. However there doesn’t seem to be any settings for doing this in blender, there only seems to be a default count unless there is a setting for this hidden somewhere?
I don’t see any floater particles in your video, which is understandable if you don’t know how to change their count, since their default count is 0.
You can change it in the domain’s properties, under Fluid Particles by increasing Generate. Careful though, that number doesn’t represent the number of particles. 1 may just be enough. If you hover over the property, it says :
Amount of particles to generate (0=off, 1=normal, >1=more)
But you can actually enter a value between 0 and 1 if you want less.
Also don’t forget to set the particles as instanced objects if you want Cycles to render them.
There are floaters in the vid. It’s the white bubble looking stuff flowing down the stream close to the splashing. I believe the “generate” property actually is for generating more splashes in the mesh(what is splashing everywhere in th vid) than the floater particles themselves. At at least that seemed to be the effect when fiddling with that property as I recall.
This baking takes almost a half day to produce the first frame as I have the sim starting 8 seconds in so there is a full stream at frame 1. Probably could drop that to about 4 for next time. So just waiting on the bake for now to see the results of upping the tracer count.
Maybe I confused the foam with reflections so I thought there wasn’t any. But I’ve tested the “Generated” property and it changed the number of floating particles for sure.
The simulation is very long to calculate, that’s a limitation of Blender. Houdini would be much faster at this. But you can bake simulations on Renderstreet if you can afford it. I don’t know if you can download the resulting blend file though. Maybe you can only get the rendered images. But maybe not, I don’t know ! I never tried it.
Ah gotcha, I may have that backwards then with the particles. Still waiting to get baking results on the 10,000 tracers. And yeah, I was considering just paying to have the fluid and smoke sims baked along with the entire thing rendered out. That video took me an entire week just to render which I thought would be the final take until I played what I had back. I have a GTX 680 yet I get a CUDA error every time I try to render with the GPU, so I’m stuck rendering with the crummy CPU.
Houdini looks awesome and I see there is a free license, I’ll have to give it a try as well.
I could be wrong but I think I saw a tutorial on water physics a while ago and it said something about scale being hugely important when it comes to accuracy of water. The water looks as if its a close up of a lot bigger river in a small scene ?
Looks very cool anyways.
