FLIP Fluids Addon: A liquid fluid simulation tool for Blender

FLIP Fluids

FLIP Fluids is a powerful liquid simulation addon that gives you the ability to create high quality fluid effects all within Blender! Created by Ryan Guy (@RLGUY) and Dennis Fassbaender (@dafassi).

  • Supported in Blender 2.79 and 2.8 for Windows, MacOS, and Linux operating systems.
  • No subscriptions, all future updates included.
  • Free trial available, no sign up necessary.

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What is the FLIP Fluids addon?

The FLIP Fluids addon is a tool that helps you set up, run, and render liquid simulation effects. Our custom built fluid engine is based around the popular FLIP simulation technique that is also found in other professional tools such as Houdini, Phoenix FD, Bifrost, and Mantaflow. The FLIP Fluids engine has been in constant development for over four years with a large focus on tightly integrating the simulator into Blender as an addon. It just feels like a native Blender tool!

With our reputation for delivering high quality software and world class customer support, the FLIP Fluids addon is one of the best selling products on the Blender Market.

High Performance
The core fluid engine, written in C++, is designed for running high performance computations and massive physics calculations efficiently. Multithreaded and extensively optimized, this simulator is built for speed.

Whitewater Effects
Create awesome large scale fluid effects with the whitewater simulator. Generate and simulate millions of foam, bubble, and spray particles to give a sense of realism to large bodies of water.

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High Viscosity Effects
Use the high accuracy viscosity solver to simulate thin silky-smooth liquids, thick fluids that buckle and coil, and anything in between. You will be able to simulate thicker fluid in Blender than you could ever before!

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Surface Tension Effects
Create beautiful small-scale fluid effects with surface tension! Simulate the natural cohesion of surface molecules that cause fluids to form into beads, drip, and add an elastic look to splashes.

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Built-in Mesh Generation
The built-in mesher generates highly detailed meshes so that your fluid surface is render-ready immediately after simulation. This mesh generator is memory efficient and able to produce meshes containing millions of triangles without requiring massive amounts of RAM.

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Fracture Modifier Support
Create interesting destruction simulations by using the FLIP Fluids addon with the Blender Fracture Modifier branch. The fluid engine is optimized to support fractured objects that may contain hundreds to thousands of individual pieces.

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Why choose FLIP Fluids?

Fluid simulation software can be intimidating, complex, and difficult to work with, but it does not need to be. We believe that usability should come first when designing a simulation tool. A simulator might contain the most advanced technology in the world, but if it is not usable, reliable, and flexible, it will not be a tool that is useful or enjoyable to the artist.

Our goal is to improve on many aspects of the built-in Blender fluid simulator such as usability, stability, customization, and to prevent common problems that we see artists encounter when working with simulation systems. We want to provide you with the tools, learning resources, and workflows to assist you in creating beautiful effects as quickly and as painlessly as possible.

Pause and Resume Baking
Bake simulations on your own schedule! Our smart caching system allows you to pause and resume simulation baking- even after a Blender crash. Did you notice a mistake halfway through the simulation? No need to restart the simulation from the beginning, you can update your setup and resume baking from an earlier frame.

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Easily Contained Fluid
Containing fluid inside of an object is a common scenario in many fluid effects. With our Obstacle Inverse Workflow, you can simply enable an option to make your object a hollow container to perfectly contain fluid without any leaks!

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Smooth Meshing Against Objects
Our mesh generator can perfectly handle meshing fluid against flat or curved surfaces, an improvement over the severe voxelization of the built-in Elbeem fluid simulator. No more mesh artifacts poking through your wine glass!

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Tutorial Series and Documentation
Learning fluid simulation does not need to be difficult. Get started with FLIP Fluids by following our video learning series. While using the addon, hover over any option for a detailed tooltip. Visit our extensive documentation and wiki for tips, notes, and detailed descriptions of settings and how they can be used.

Responsive UI and Feedback
Being able to see feedback on how your simulation is progressing is essential to a good workflow. The simulator is designed to run in the background so that Blender is still completely usable during simulation. You will be able to view new frames as the simulation progresses while setting up materials and lighting for render. Detailed statistics are provided as your simulation runs to help you understand how your set up is performing.

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Beginner Friendly
Are you new to fluid simulation? We have a beginner friendly mode just for you! The FLIP Fluids addon contains a plethora of settings for customizing your simulation, but this can make the UI intimidating to new users. Enabling Beginner Friendly Mode will hide the more advanced settings so that you can focus on the common settings that are used the most.

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Debugging Tools
Is your simulation not running as expected? We provide you with helpful built-in tools that you can use to debug your simulation setup. Visualize the simulation grid to better understand how grid detail relates to resolution. Visualize how the simulator is converting your obstacles into solid volumes to diagnose problems related to geometry and insufficient resolution.

Stable, Reliable, and Built for You
The FLIP Fluids addon has been tested by thousands of users, including over 250 beta testers to ensure that this complex simulation system is reliable, intuitive, and ready for you to use in your projects. We listen to your feedback and add your suggestions. This addon is built for you!

Incredible Value

This is the most affordable fluid simulation tool you will ever buy. Other professional fluid simulation packages can run you hundreds of dollars per year for a license.

For a one time purchase of $76 (USD), you will gain access to the full FLIP Fluids simulation product which includes all future updates and customer support. Do you want to work entirely within Blender? Then this is the best value you will get!

What you get:

  • The FLIP Fluids addon installation file
  • Example scenes with lighting and render setups
  • Tool support
  • Access to all future updates and new features
  • Full addon and engine source code

Want a free trial? Install the free FLIP Fluids Demo today! No sign up necessary.

System Requirements

  • Windows, MacOS, or Linux operating system
  • Blender 2.79 and 2.8 (64-bit)
  • CPU 64-bit Intel® or AMD® multi-core processor
  • 8 GB RAM minimum, 16 GB or more of RAM memory is highly recommended

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27 Likes

Thank you Ryan Guy and Dennis Fassbaender ! One if not THE most long-awaited plugin for Blender !

Can’t wait to use it :slight_smile:

I’ve been looking forward for this since I saw some video on twitter, it looks very promising! Last month I had to do some fluidsim. I tried using manta flow, but I ended up using houdini. It’s a shame I couldn’t try this back then! :smiley: I am thinking to apply for the beta, but I wanna make sure I can give a fair amount of time to this, and time is always scarce! :smiley: However thank you for the work, it looks very good!

Thanks Bernardo, we have been looking forward to this also! We would have liked to have begun the beta earlier, but wanted to get the addon polished to a high standard before releasing it upon testers. Hope you’re able to find some time!

This looks great. Count me in, I’ll be sending you an email with my info. Will there be gaseous support in the future?

Thanks Thomas, we have received your info! At the moment, we’re focusing strictly on fluid simulation effects, but in the future, maybe we’ll be able to expand to gas/smoke/fire. For now, the Blender Mantaflow branch may be a good solution for FLIP based gas effects.

I think I may not be alone in wondering how your addon or solution compares to Mantaflow?

I could do some comparisons. Seeing the simulation speed and stability will be most interesting i think? A big difference is our Workflow. On one hand our addon is as well integrated as the internal fluidsim. On the other hand we use some tricks like layering objects or hiding them like known from the fracture modifier’s helpers addon for example.

I have spent much more time using this simulator than I have spent trying out Mantaflow, so I am not able to give an accurate/unbiased comparison for FLIP Fluids Addon vs Blender Mantaflow. Once testing begins, other users may be able to make fair comparisons.

Both this addon and Mantaflow are based on the FLIP method. I believe we both even use the same method of simulation for foam/bubble/spray particles. What will be the difference is how we each implement the simulation methods, what features we have chosen to include in our respective simulation programs, how we decided to layout our user interfaces, etc.

is it going to be a paid addon ?

and can you have objects as obstacles ?
I mean like boat or other objects

thanks
happy bl

This addon will be a commercial product sold on the BlenderMarket. We do not have a set price at the moment. Our goal is to provide a high quality fluid simulation solution at a price that will be affordable to beginners and hobbyists.

Scripted obstacles are supported. This means that the object’s movement is able to affect the fluid, but there is no support for the fluid to be able to ‘push back’ on the object. This is also known as ‘one-way’ coupling.

Types of animated objects that are supported:

  • keyframed positions/scale/rotation
  • animated, such as parenting and armatures
  • both rigid and deformable objects
  • fractured objects with the Fracture Modifier

There are two main restrictions for objects to work well with the simulator:

  • Objects must be manifold. This means that the mesh has a clearly defined inside and outside. Every edge must be connect to exactly two faces.
  • Animated meshes must not change topology. This means that every frame in the animation must have the same vertices and triangles.

I’d love to help test this! :smiley: The current fluid tools in Blender right now feel very limiting to me, and this looks amazing!

Is FLIP only used for large-scale fluid sims, like oceans, lakes, bursting dams, or can it be used for smaller things as well, like spilled glasses, drips, or puddles and things like that?

This simulator works well for large-scale bodies of water, especially in combination with the whitewater feature. The viscosity solver works very well when used for small-scale effects where the liquid buckles/coils.

The simulator has some trouble replicating small scale water (non-viscous) effects, suh as crown splashes, due to the lack of surface tension forces. Surface tension forces are one of the features we would like to add in the future so that small scale water effects can be achieved.

Fantastic presentation! I love seeing add-ons for Blender that rival the quality of commercial addons for Maya and 3DS. Sign me up!

Would it make simulation of oceans?

Usually oceans, especially infinite oceans, are made with displacement maps, not fluids, but in advanced setup you can mix fluids and displacement oceans!

When you want to make ocean segments to interact you need something more than displacements, you need water with movement, ways to simulate waves

This is great, and I’m sure will be well worth the cost. Good job guys!

Are really GPus supported? How much faster are the calculations then?

Ohhh man, this is the future! I will spend my time waiting this :smiley: