Warning! You do not want to skip to the bottom of this post and blindly download the linked file. You probably don’t want it, and most likely can’t even play it. It’s mostly just a huge waste of bandwidth.
Like everyone, I’ve wanted to do at least one nice fluid simulation, knowing full well that there is no art involved at all. You just set it up and let it run; Blender does all the real work. This one is a little different only in that it is very large and detailed. I made it while doing tests of my upgraded network rendering software here at my school.
There were 450 simulation frames baked at a very high resolution and rendered at 1920 x 1080 with motion blur. The resulting file is a native BluRay movie file so it is very large (77.3 Megabytes). It is a total of only 761 frames – just over 25 seconds – so you don’t get much for the time it would take to download the file.
As already mentioned, you probably should NOT download the movie file. You probably don’t have a monitor that can display it (1920 horizontal pixels or wider - most are only 1024 or 1280 wide), nor have the horsepower to play it. It might play with Quicktime, but I would recommend using VLC instead.
Although the file name ends in “.mpg”, this is because I changed it from “.m2ts”, just like you might rename a DVD’s VOB files to “.mpg”. You might have to change it back to an “.m2ts” file if you try to play it on a Playstation 3 or other BluRay player, and you’d have to create the proper directory structure as well. I didn’t bother as I’ve only played it on computers.
A few sample still frames follow as well, resized down to 1024x768 as the native sizes are too large for this forum to accept.
If you do want to download the movie for some reason, you should right-click and “save as…” instead of clicking on it. You want to save it to your computer and play it from there, not attempt to play it in your browser. Save the file somewhere then open it up in VLC.
I would have preferred that you not present the Blu-Ray .m2ts transport stream for downloading. It is unlikely that most media players will play it. (You could have just uploaded the MPEG-2 stream prior to Muxing).
That aside, I’m proficient enough with video tools to Demux the stream into the raw underlying MPEG-2 video data.
As for computers not being powerful enough to view it. I could understand such a claim if the underlying file were an H264/AVC/VC1 stream which requires much more CPU/GPU processing.
Since the file is actually not that much different from an MPEG-2 based HDV stream (except for raster size)… I don’t see many ‘modern’ computers struggling.
> I would have preferred that you not present the Blu-Ray .m2ts
> transport stream…
You are of course correct in every point you make. It is in that format just because of laziness. I had that clip, amongst others, in Avid and so just isolated that one, and exported it out to a BluRay project. I didn’t mux it by hand. But I didn’t worry it about much since VLC can play it and I thought it might be easiest to use in case anyone wanted to play it on Playstation 3 etc.
> As for computers not being powerful enough to view it…
> …I don’t see many ‘modern’ computers struggling.
Again, I agree. I was just exaggerating to discourage people from downloading it who might not be as proficient as you. I didn’t want to see a bunch of “It doesn’t work” and “I can’t play it” posts for what is a very large download for a very short clip. I only wanted people to download it that understood what it was.
> Still, that’s splitting hairs.
Not at all. It’s nice to talk to someone who knows of these things. Thanks for your comments!
> what are the setting you used for the water texture?
I’ve attached an image that shows most of the setting for this rendering. The water was pretty simple. The only trick was giving it an environment to reflect, and this was done with an HDR image.
The fluid bake resolution was 200. Start time 0, end time 4 seconds. There were 450 frames in the simulation. When it was all done I imported the mesh from the first frame into a new animation to show the logo being inserted into the solid block of water.
> …and just what kind of monster rig did it take to do the job?
I baked the simulation on my laptop (Dell Vostro 1700 - 1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo) on one weekend I was a bit bored. It took about 16 hours to bake and it made 1.9 Gigabytes of fluid mesh
I copied it all to the network at work (a private school where I am a programmer / network administrator) and rendered it on our render farm. I can get more than 200 machines working on some jobs, but for this one I just used our 93 fastest machines. It still took a couple of days.
It didn’t have to take so long. I didn’t have to enable motion blur (I had tried vector blur but it looked funny), use AAO, nor use the HDR, but I really didn’t care how long it took to render out. Sometimes its nice to turn the dial “up to 11”.
I used FFMPEG to create a DNXHD file from the frames (681 Megabytes for this little clip!) and imported it into Avid Media Composer to make it part of a larger project. Once that was all done with I clipped out this part and exported it to a BluRay volume using “Avid DVD by Sonic”.
